You would think that more users means more money for reddit. But I think that might be wrong. I can only assume that 3rd party apps make up a small portion of their daily active users (a metric they likely use to sell ad space). And 3rd party apps aren’t giving reddit any ad revenue. On top of that maintaining the API and support for 3rd party apps costs money. From a business perspective it probably makes a lot of sense to start charging for use.
I didn’t reddit will go away for a while. It’s almost too big to fail. The large reddit run subs are still live and active. Users who don’t sub to any subs that went dark may not even know anything happened. I have to imagine reddit knew they would lose users of 3rd party apps so it likely isn’t a large portion of where they make money. I think there will probably be a decline in content for a short time, then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.
I feel the same way. I think it’s a little less intimidating as most postshave less comments so I feel like I’ll be lost in the crowd less. I also feel like if we want to make lemmy the reddit replacement we have to use it so other people thinking of switching will see that it is active.
Might as well risk and arm processors are in the news all the time as they get better. Apple m2 showed us that these other architectures could be better.