June would be 9 years for me. I remember I joined because I had just gotten into Formula 1 and found a great place to read about it among a community that I, as someone with social anxiety, remain anonymous, but also, as someone with ADHD, geek out and hyperfocus on all the ins-and-outs and fit in.
It has been 9 long years. My subscribed list tells the story of those years. Once I subscribed to something I never unsubscribed, even if I never went back so I would have those memories of “Oh, I remember when that happen and I was super into ____.” It saw me get divorced, it saw me leave the military and travel across the country to fight wildfires. It saw me meet the person that I should have married to begin with and share Reddit with them. It has been the one constant over the last decade, that while I can move on and leave because I love it here, I just don’t think I can delete my account. It would be like deleting those memories and I just struggle with that.
This is what I was getting at. Any other point in time, people would have just sat on the sidelines until subs opened again, but now that alternatives exist, people have somewhere to go.
I personally think that regardless of Reddit going back on API pricing and what not, they burned too many bridges with outside devs that third party apps would be going away period. They didn’t just cross the line, the treated it like the Olympic long jump. Reddit did some real damage to a lot of communities, not just hobby’s but users with disabilities, neurodivergent users, and many more that relied on apps to help them use Reddit.
If it wasn’t for the fediverse, I’m not gonna lie, I’d probably go back. But now that I’m here, no way.