Same. It's about more than just the app to me. It felt like a betrayal of the social contract which brought me to Reddit in the first place, and which kept me there even as I slowly aged out of the main culture, as the site became a hot bed for shady viral marketing and information warfare, and then as the site became infested with fascist mind rot.
That contract was about building and curating your own experience, which was genuinely a radical idea in the forum world at one point in time. But killing off the API signalled to me that this was no longer the casem. Spez was building just another shitty walled garden, and that was taking precedence over the "build your own reddit" experience I'd come to know and love.
I think that's a good way of putting it. I couldn't be on Reddit any more afterwards and Spez being like, let's just wait it out. It felt like a spit in the face.
Yup. I had never heard of the fediverse and so glad I got introduced to it with the added benefit of many others doing so as well (so there is content and activity here).
Particularly the emphasis on the importance of decentralisation and setting it up right so never again do we have to go through that loss of community and platform. It really sucked in ways equally rational and emotional.
The platform of the fediverse may continue but the loss of community is still very much a possibility. All it takes is hostile actors manipulating their way into control of a particular community and then they can shutter it or steer it in a direction of their choosing. Every community on every server is like a Corp in Eve. It's easy to start an alternative but the specific community will still be harmed. But that's life.