The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
We are not entitled to what other people made. They are free to delete their stuff, or to restrict access to it. We are also not entitled to have access to other peoples’ forums.
So of course the Fediverse doesn’t prevent this kind of “information destruction”. It does not. And it would be ethically questionable if it did.
The information destruction we are seeing right now is a protest against exactly this kind of stuff: Reddit is selling other people’s content for a ludicrous price by charging too much for their API use. And they are forcing communities to be managed a certain way, cracking down and forcing the replacement of moderators etc. in case of non compliance. This is the reason why this implosion is happening.
And the fediverse as a whole, as a much more decentralized system, is a lot more immune to what caused those protests.