I have been peaking over at reddit periodically, morbid curiosity really. Schadenfreude.
The number of apathetic users who thinks that protesting has accomplished nothing is unsurprising, logically, but is viscerally a gut punch. The fate of social media and the internet at large is important as its a stepping stone (often times overvalued but important none the less) to addressing bigger societal issues. The fact that so many people don't care about an issue as it doesn't effect them directly and they have no curiosity or empathy on how/why it's impacting other, bluntly fucking sucks. It makes the bigger issues seem even more unsolvable.
This is what is so frustrating to me as well! I have visited a few old subs to see where/if they were moving and the amount of people saying essentially "why would the mods do a useless protest" and "nobody cares about kbin/Lemmy nobody is going to switch" is so perplexing to me. I also get frustrated at "this change won't affect me so I just want to sub opened" when I have seen it explained multiple times that a lot of the useful mod tools are built on these API calls so if you want to have well moderated subs, you want this to be worked out! And even without that, just the way that reddit is handling this whole situation sucks.
I mean the part of the problem is people have this irrational hatred of moderators. Like obviously some of them are power tripping people but I think people sort of forget these at the end of the day volunteers who are making the place actually usable for its purpose. Obviously this isn't to give them a free pass and they are as fallible as any other human and should be held accountable when they make mistakes but it feels so many people want a perfectly moderated space but without the mods.
Potentially, but let's see what happens after the API change. I am curious how many are still using other apps and will have a rude awaking. (Assuming it happens.)