The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
IMO, Reddit kept the people who didn't care about third party apps or the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media. Everyone who did care, left. And that's not really a victory.
Reddit kept the people who didn't care about third party apps
Which is important to note is like 90%+ of users, most of whom never participate and just consume content.
I felt many of the protesters had no clue how unpopular (by numbers) 3rd party clients were. The reason they seemed so prevalent in discussions is because reddit users who use 3rd party clients are power users who actually participate versus everyone else who just browses. These protests showed the ugly reality that they were always a small vocal minority.
I left reddit and edited all my comments/posts on principle, but I was never under the illusion that I was part of the majority or that the protests would lead to something.
Of course I hope Lemmy got some nice visibility and that something positive comes out of it, but I'm not clinging onto a pipe dream.
That's a long game. There is no way that having viable open-source competitors appear and gain an established user base is a positive outlook for corporate data scraping businesses who need to lure us into their mouse traps. We can expect them to seek "friendly integrations" with fediverse in the future.