I'm actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I'm sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn't been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There's a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
I have been thinking about this a lot in light of recent events. Growing up in the era of smaller communities, forums, etc. I can't say large, monolithic, corporate entities have ultimately been a change for the better.
It's not better. It was only better since I didn't have to create several accounts for the different forums I would use. This small inconvience was enough to stop contributions from people that don't even care about that topic.
The downvoting is the worst part. I've seen correct comments downvoted, not opinions but tech questions dealing with standards. Downvoting creates an anonymous mob mentality. This gets bad when the mob knows nothing about the topic and is open to all.
Reddit has destroyed so many communities because of how easy they made everything. No one really talks about that.
I'm hoping the app developers move to Lemmy. I'd happily pay monthly for Sync, and he could spin up his own server and the fee would cover those costs as well. I'm sure many people would do the same for their favorite apps.