Awesome. The Linux community should be among the vanguard of this whole effort given our philosophy.
Honestly I've only been on Lemmy for a few days and I don't anticipate going back to Reddit. I'll probably use Reddit for IT help queries periodically but that's it. I like Lemmy quite a bit more.
It'd be even better if all these subreddits indefinitely go dark. As someone who grew up using the "old" internet with Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists for discussions, I am happy that decentralized way doing things might be adopted again.
I mean... The plan to go dark was originally to protest the API pricing and policy changes. And as far as I understood, they're all going dark until Reddit backtracks those announcements
Initially at least, the subs I saw were talking of going dark only for a couple of days, with only a few stating that they will go dark indefinitely. If everyone is on board now for indefinite darkness then that's great!
lemmy.ml is probably slow for you because of the influx of new users you can avoid this by joining a smaller general instance, like sh.itjust.works for example. We have a badass Canadian admin who is keeping our server running extremely smoothly so far. I had major issues when I signed up on lemmy.ml and beehaw, but this instance is running smooth and is nowhere near capacity.
I've made the transition from Reddit to Lemmy so much more seamlessly than I did from Twitter to Mastodon. The percentage of Lemmy users that post high quality content & comments is much higher than Reddit, and a forum-based platform doesn't really need many users to be useful, it just needs users who post content and interact meaningfully with one another.
Someone else pointed out they were going to use their 3rd party app til the day it got turned off to very explicitly show Reddit the reason they stopped showing up.
Reddit 100% know how much traffic is coming in through their API. They can also 100% track how much of your usage in via what method. You don't need to wait until the last day. They know that you're using Apollo or RIF. They've already calculated that cost and either assume that you're a sheep that will simply migrate to their app or don't care about you in specific. Either way they've already written you off. No reason to drive any additional traffic to their platform.
I'm hopeful that at least FOSS-specific communities like this one will be smart enough not to go back to the centralized, proprietary shit-hole of Reddit.