There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.
The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.
Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.
Mind you, we're having this conversation on a link aggregator site owned by a company...
Reddit is convenient. It's literally all your interests in one place. And for some interests, it's the best place to go.
Most people don't care who owns the platform. Someone always will. It's as abstract as someone telling them that they shouldn't be letting Apple or Microsoft control their OS. To a regular person, the "Linux alternative" isn't freedom, it's letting Canonical run the show.
Arguably Canonical's hold on the community is much looser than Apple or even Microsoft. Because much of Ubuntu can be forked, much like RHEL was twice forked regardless of RedHat's wishes.
Mastodon servers too have a very loose hold on their communities.
Because in the end of the day centralisation of content wins. The same reason that facebook is still the best place for many people in many places of the world to advertise/discover events, or sell/buy stuff, despite its horrible UX for this kind of things. The current problem is not making a good website for X specific thing around human interactions, but how to put things together.
There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.
The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.
Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.