Obviously a few years ago, the API changes caused the reddit community mods to strike, and caused a mass-blackout of most reddit core communities. Eventually Reddit removed a handful of mod teams on some notable subreddits and caused the rest to chicken-out. But it did birth the Fediverse properly.
I suspect Reddit will make another step at some point which causes another comparable exodus. This time, if they do, the Fediverse is far better developed to handle it. What do you imagine it might be?
I used to think it would be the death of Old Reddit, but sadly they started that recently-ish and I’ve seen almost no pushback against it.
The issue is that they have a brain and are taking the slow approach, where they gradually strip away features and introduce interoperability hurdles to turn Old Reddit into the objectively worse choice so people make the switch to Shreddit of their own free will.
It started when they removed Private Messaging and made Chat, the replacement, exclusive to Shreddit. Notifications were also planned to become exclusive to Shreddit (try staying on top of replies without notifications), but new ones are still showing up in the direct messages archive for me.
Then they removed any indication of a subreddit’s size from Old Reddit (but replaced the subscriber count with an active users count on Shreddit). So if you want to know which of two subreddits on the same topic is bigger, you need Shreddit for that comparison. Then there’s the new wiki system which iirc is not backwards compatible to Old Reddit.
Just like this, more and more features are turned into Shreddit exclusives, until there’ll be nothing left to use Old Reddit for. Yet people don’t seem particularly bothered by it.
The single community I’m still visiting (read-only) on old.reddit has recently dried up to tumbleweed territory. I could stop going there overnight, and not miss a thing.