I don’t see Old Reddit lasting long. They’ve cut beloved features before, and they’re still calling New Reddit a “beta feature”. After they’ve pumped enough resources into developing it, I’m sure they’ll move past the “test” phase and just cut Old Reddit out entirely. That’s probably going to be Lemmy’s next big user surge.
Does Reddit suppress mentioning Lemmy? I remember for a while this past June 2023 there were a lot of auto-deletions for mentioning or linking to Lemmy. I was never clear on who was deleting things and where. I guess linking to the r/Lemmy subreddit (or a fediverse sub) could work as long as the subreddit doesn’t get banned.
That’s already happening, but the ability to “adopt” communities helps to combat that. You can go to [email protected] and request to take over abandoned communities created by others, provided the original creator has been inactive and the community really IS abandoned / unmoderated. That way, someone who is actually interested in doing something for / with the community gets put in charge for a second chance (instead of the community name squatter being allowed to block the community name forever).
I adopted [email protected] a couple of months ago for xample. It didn’t have a sidebar, rules, banner, icon, and the original creator had contributed zero content, so even tho that game is popular at the moment, there was barely anything interesting in there (plus some offtopic posts that were simply never removed). Now it has 2.6k subscribers and a steady stream of content, and offtopic stuff / insulting comments and the like actually get removed.
I also adopted [email protected] yesterday by the way, so the above comment that this community is “abandoned and devoid of content” is no longer true ;) maybe I should edit that … hm.
Long story short, I still think adopting abandoned communities is a good thing. provided the “adopter” is active enough themselves to make the community thrive.