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!