From the article:
Meanwhile, the blackout has affected Reddit in other important ways. There’s been a small, but growing push among some power users to federated Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. These decentralized platforms are still niche, and have many of the same challenges as Mastodon and other Twitter alternatives. Yet there seems to be growing interest from some corners of Reddit in recent weeks.
It’s especially galling because Reddit themselves have created so little actual additional value beyond that content they get for free from users. Yes, sure, they built and maintain the infrastructure on which the communities run. They should be compensated for that. But beyond just those infrastructure costs, they’ve created a bunch of crap no one asked for or wants. NFTs, awards, automatically enabled chat “features,” “suggested for you” algorithmic posts that get in the way of what you actually asked to see, etc. Do they honestly think they should be compensated for providing that “experience”? It seems like the whole corporate social media playbook right now is relentlessly pushing out things users don’t want and then getting mad when they won’t pay for them.