"Apollo dev should create his own backend and show them!"
OK..? He'll take his 600k users, most of whom never contributed content, and do what exactly? Create his own little dead forum that runs only on iOS?
It's not a technical problem, let's stop pretending there's a technical solution. Plenty of reddit clones exist already (many even open-source).
I'm not convinced building a Reddit is hard, at all.
But getting a mass adoption of users to make it worth using is.
Which is why I'm continually surprised some startup+VC combo doesn't just build it and then pay the top 1000 broad-to-niche influencers out there to sign up and start relentlessly hawking it on their various social medias.
Is Reddit/Twitter "better" because everything is in one place? Maybe. But then it's a hard problem that requires money, and we end up where Reddit/Twitter are today.
I'd say an app like Reddit is especially prone to this because most decent devs probably could recreate the core UX (subreddits, posts, comments) in a couple of weeks. The really hard part is all the features people don't usually think about (mod and admin tools, for example) plus scaling up to millions of concurrent users.
But this: a) is only a little easier, it's still really hard to move even a tight-knit and smaller community like that, and b) really doesn't apply at all for third-party client developers, whose users surely use and belong to a wide spread of the subreddits, so the task for them is more like "replicate Reddit overnight."
The smaller the subreddit, the easier the move, but there's still the discovery issue, especially since centralized "platforms" are starting to turn into centralized points of failure.
Is it harder than trying to influence Reddit by these "protests"? No, because the later has 0 chance of success.
Probably pretty tinfoil (on both sides) though.
The only sticking point is in all the people who want things to be “federated” for whatever (generally bogus) reason.
Better yet: cloudflare/etc’s preexisting backend.
apollo is 20x times smaller than regular reddit according to app store stats.
The only limiting factor is ambition. And on a site with quite a few people from the startup world who see that the only thing in the way is the technical difficulty of building the service then it shouldn't be unexpected that people are saying they should take their users off to a new platform they build themselves. Because that's the kind of crazy thing that startup people think about.