I will say that the short blackout was enough to get me onto the Fediverse. I didn’t even use the apps that would be affected by the API shutdown, so I never would have noticed the controversy without the blackout.

But once the blackout was announced, I recognized how far reddit was willing to go in service of harvesting its users’ data. And after that point, I just didn’t feel good on the site anymore. (Granted, I first created an account on Mastodon because the people calling for blackouts never mentioned Lemmy. But still!)

Between Facebook’s notification system repeatedly failing to direct me to comment replies, Twitter DDoSing itself, and reddit turning into the Eye of Sauron (which, again, I would not have even noticed happening were it not for the short protest), it seemed like the perfect time to exit the sinking ship of corporate social media.

Meaning they did something. Maybe they didn’t avert the reddit apocalypse, but they still did something.