Service issues and downtime were pretty regular issues at the beginning though just as they are now on Lemmy.

Yep, unscheduled service interruptions and planned downtime were a fact of life on reddit for years. I can still remember when the reddit admins always announced downtime before swapping out the hamster powering their server.

Actually, I’d say when reddit stopped announcing downtime that’s when things started to noticeably change. Admins stopped even trying to pretend to be redditors themselves and their comms became a lot less casual and authentic.