I think trying to protest reddit via the blackouts is one tactic, but it appears to be losing a lot of steam for many misinformed reasons. I'm betting there's a lot of shilling as well.
Perhaps the next phase should be to go after Reddit's investors and advertisers and make it clear to them they are investing and posting ads in a dying community and will lose a ton of money.
In other words, investing in the dying reddit is a quick way to lose money. Investors and advertisers should pull out of reddit ASAP.
Fidelity cut the value of it's stake in reddit by nearly half earlier this year. It's likely that reddit's value is going to tank substantially in the next few months. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
Here are some of the investors that have some stake in reddit:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reddit/company_financials
I think it needs to be made clear that reddit is absolutely nothing without the community it attracts. The communities are driven by high engagement and good moderators who are all volunteers and work for free
Moderators are unable to work without proper moderation tools. Reddit admins have promised better ones for years and nothing has come to fruition. It's all lies.
The community is unable to have any sense of engagement if they can't post or access content due to default website and Reddit app simply being broken and littered with ads that are completely irrelevant to the audience.
Speaking of ads, advertisers should also stop paying for ads because they're being blatantly mistargeted. You're wasting A TON of money on ads that will not only not be clicked, but will be straight up blocked.
It's unlikely reddit will fix these glaring issues since they've made that promise for nearly a decade and have only made things substantially worse.
In short, anyone who wants to invest in reddit should invest elsewhere. You WILL lose your money. It's guaranteed.
I agree with the scalability issues. Instance owners are going to run up against whatever they can afford to pay. If a given instance grows to a point where the hardware required to run it would be too expensive, then the admin has a choice: Donations, payment, and/or sponsorship.
All have their pros and cons.
Assuming "Lemmy" becomes popular (there's a ton of barriers preventing this so far). there's inevitably going to be consolidation between whoever can afford to support the largest instances.
Also, I think the most confusing part about the whole "fediverse" is that each instance is the entire "platform" of whatever it's trying to be.
This IMO creates massive fragmentation and a ton of confusion. Which one is the "authoritative" instance? Oh there's none? Oh...well...Hmm.
I'm sort of starting to think of it like this:
Reddit (or whatever fediverse whatever) is like a single shopping mall and the stores are subreddits. Each store needs a unique name.
Lemmy is like a bunch of shopping malls with each shopping mall having its own set of stores.
Stores within a single shopping mall must have a unique name, but can use the same name as a store in another mall. For example, you'd be hard-pressed to find two Foot Lockers in the same mall, but you're likely to find them in pretty much every mall you visit in the USA at least.