At this point it seems likely that Reddit is so incompetent, they just ran a script to check if a subreddit was private and extort the mods if it was, without any check on how long the sub had been private.
This kinda feels like proactive cautionary action to protect their community (which absolutely is good) since they don't outright say admins have been threatening them. Because even an idiot should've figured out to check when the sub was set to private when creating that supposed script.
Does the Fediverse have a similar feature, where communities/magazines can be private and only allow users to view/subscribe to them with mod approval?
I know this is possible with instances, but that seems impractical since the account would be defederated from the entire Fediverse to maintain privacy.
It will never be a safe space as long as spez is around
period. Centralized systems like Reddit are inherently beholden to the views of the people who own the central hub. Even if the people at Reddit now were "cool", eventually a piece of shit would end up in a position of power and compromise the site. As we have seen time and time again, both recently and throughout history, we cannot allow our systems to be contingent on the assumed goodwill of the people who run it. Said differently, we need to assume that bastards will take control at some point in the future, and intentionally design our systems to be robust in the face of disturbances caused by bad actors.