This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
That’s weird, I haven’t seen u/spez around here lately.
Reddit was great for at least 5-10 years, the main issue that caused everyone to leave was that it became corporatized and had to start making a profit. That can literally never happen on Lemmy, because it’s free and decentralized. So yes, Lemmy is special and insulated from corporate abuse. If you can’t understand the value of that, you may as well go back to reddit.
It’s not free of corporatist behaviour though, especially on the large instances. This is a classic example. I guess at least people can vote with their feet, and still stay on the fediverse.
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