While I do agree with you that spez fucking up like this was, in a way, an excellent thing for the internet, by “failed,” he was referring to the mods who went back to Reddit. And it appears that there were lots of them. It’s more about giving up so quickly and protesting in a weird way rather than some people starting to migrate to open platforms.

This is still a success for me! I’ve been a local Armenian Mastodon user for a long time. Then Elon took over Twitter, and many folks I was interested in following migrated to Mastodon, finally making me open up an international/English account there. And now this allowed me to replace Reddit with a federated FOSS, which is super-cool! I’m grateful for that, actually!

Just finished watching the video - I think the main reason he’s calling it a failure is because the site is effectively “business as usual” again as far as a regular user is concerned, with little positive outcome for the people affected by the changes. He also expresses concern about this setting a bad precedent.

Personally, I think the protest has been OK so far, a lot of nice folk have moved into the Fediverse (and other alternatives), with the toxic users mainly staying on Reddit. There’s more 3rd party Lemmy apps in the works, and it’s very active here with the ex-redditors.

All-in-all, a pretty positive outcome for some users like ourselves, but sadly not for everyone affected