You can, it’ll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Not yet possible, sadly
I wouldn’t fault them as much if they hadn’t dumped the capital into absurdly dumb things to try and become facebook. If they’d invested it into better reliability and reducing costs to operate, I’d have a ton of sympathy.
I dunno, the way they’ve (board members, ceo, admins involved in trying to spin things, etc) been acting, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want the engaged, active users back. They want to turn it into an ad server and user tracking hub like facebook.
Maybe if they can spez, build a new board of directors, and walk back everything they’ve done totally, I might be willing to use it passively but directly (as in reading things there via my app of choice, but not interacting) rather than only indirectly via search results when the only hits are there.
That ain’t gonna happen. If they don’t do that, my last act will be to find replacement mods for the places I’m responsible for, and then I’m gone totally. I’d have done it already, but I’d have to use reddit to recruit anyone at all, and I’m not willing to do that until the protest is over.
Hell, I’ve thought about just doing enough mod actions that admins would have to break their own rules to oust me, and leaving them locked. But I don’t like shitting on communities of people just because the site has gone to shit.
Reddit still pulls things to r/all, even if what’s there is some abandoned sub. It’s why some subs went restricted instead of private, so they can make posts about the protest and the issue behind it that will still be surfaced.
A lot of newer users don’t bother going past r/all, so there’s going to be some activity constantly since not everyone knows what’s going on.
Hell, I made three posts about it all on r/edc, and I’m still getting people asking why they can’t post. I’m not moderating during the two day blackout at all, but I get the notifications.
Which is fine. The protest has never been about getting people to stop using reddit. It’s about the moderators standing up and making the point that it’s the users and mods that made reddit worth anything to begin with. And it was. Reddit side? The admins that handled day to day activity helped a ton when they could, but reddit beyond that was just servers and software. Without content, that’s useless.
How does one use this?
I took r/edc restricted yesterday, though we are/were tiny. While I still plan to find replacement mods from within the community after reddit goes full dipshit, I’m done ring their work for free, with shit tools, next to zero support, and (worse, imo) taking a lot of flak from admins because of bullshit unrelated to moderation.
I dunno if lemmy is going to become the reddit replacement or not, but I’m done with giving reddit anything at all. Overwrote and deleted everything from my author account that had some decent amount of fiction, and my personal account that had a lot of real stories from my life. That ain’t much, but since I’ve seen my stuff being read on YouTube, and reposted by the copy/paste bots, it’s something I guess.
Rats are smart, cute, and (when not living in gross places) very clean.
So, yay rats!