for the past 4 years reddit (and most other community activities across the web) has already bled to fb groups. any google result of reddit content are on average 4-7 years old now, marking the date of when things began to change. the blackout was the beginning of the end though and there is no way they will recover now that the api is for all intents and purposes in permanent lockdown.
i mean, since when did stock value reflect reality lol.
and while anecdotal, the few times i’ve been exposed to fresh reddit content the top comments have been ai.
regardless, people were already migrating to mastodon.social en masse with millions of signups within the first week aka the first attempted exodus from twitter upon musks acquisition, but the mastodon team then blocked new signups to mastodon.social arguing that it will be better for federation if all these new users signed up with other servers which triggered the whole “servers are too complicated” articles all over the web followed by the journalists complaining about reblogging and mastodon devs saying it’s not a feature they want to add. of course the hype died down fast when the two things necessary for continued growth through critical mass was actively prevented by the dev team.
this isn’t the first time mastodon devs has acted against their own best interest. when facebook shut down their free internet service in india mastodon had a massive surge of users and instead of capitalizing on it they went on a witch hunt to shut down any official government users “to protect their users free speech”.
the exodus from reddit had a similar problem; there was a shit ton of people condemning lemmy and pushing people towards kbin by slandering the lemmy team. kbin wasn’t ready and the developer dropped out early on so it basically acted to split the community and push people back towards reddit, because “who wants to be on a service developed and maintained by russian sympathizers”.
it sure seems like a lot of people are determined to make sure the fediverse does not succeed, including the devs themselves. just look at how many on fucking lemmy is promoting bluesky over mastodon. and it wouldn’t shock me if all this nonsense will die down in a few weeks too. like turning off a switch. just like all the political misinformation during every election.