If you want to see what a forum site looks like without any of that stuff, look at 8kun/8chan. I don’t think you realize how unusably terrible reddit would be without mods.

Before Elon, it was about half an million, now it’s about 4.5 million, though about a million of the new users made an account and then immediately went back to Twitter, so it’s more like 3.5 million

Yeah, it’s basically like email. Though I imagine an instance like that would get defedded pretty quick

Yeah, it’s a beautiful system. When all the banned Twitter Nazis moved to gab and then gab moved to Mastodon everyone immediately defedded them, it’s like having a pre-curated blocklist of most of the worst people on the platform

Almost definitely, but no guarantee a new instance will have the same communities 1-1 though. It would be really useful for resubbing to non-local communities thought

Self-hosting might be the only way to do this, I imagine any instance with enough users will have people wanting to post locally

It may or may not take off to the point of replacing reddit, but I think the exodus if people now and especially after the end of the month will lead to it having at least the same amount of users as Mastodon. Maybe more, since the average reddit user is probably more tech-savvy and more willing to migrate to a different platform than the average Twitter user (since they follow subreddits rather than individual users). And a roughly Mastodon sized lemmy is more than usable to replace reddit imo