It is so frustrating seeing how people received the protest.
"it's not working" "Reddit doesn't care" "they can do whatever they want".
Well yeah, if that's the attitude!
How do people not see that the protest disrupted the entirity of Reddit? Just about every weekly active user felt it.
How do they not understand the impact on revenue (especially ads), and how Reddit cannot feasibly sustain it, and were banking on the idea that it'll eventually die down?
The fact of the matter is, if Reddit became worried that the protest will continue in strength indefinitely, they would be forced to roll back. The loss impact would greatly outweigh whatever measly profits they make from this API change that no one will buy.
Yes, this was a lot more for Reddit than just profits. If Reddit had backed down, it would have impact much greater than just third party apps. It remind people once again that users hold the power when they're United. They can decide how to run their communities. But Reddit just could not afford this to happen, which is why they fought to convince you that the protest isn't working and you should back down. And unfortunately many of us did...
Reddit is nothing without users posting and upvoting posts and comments. If all, or a large proportion of the users stopped using the site, reddit would have to listen or they'd stop being useful. I think there are two problems:
As you said, users don't realize the power they have. It's a bit more nuanced than that, they do realize the power of the collective, but don't think the collective will exercise that power, and thus won't act individually. It's the same as "my vote doesn't matter, it's just one vote". This is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are making it happen, they simply need to follow what they think is right.
A lot of users don't care. Again, a bit more nuanced than that, most users probably have a preference reddit listens to their users, keeps the 3rd party app access, etc. But they don't care enough to do anything about it, which in effect means in any practical way, they don't care. I'm guessing that to them this feels a bit of a "niche" problem and will use the official app. There are a small amount of users, like me and probably you reading this who've left reddit and won't go back.
The protests have worked. They've moved a motivated minority over to lemmy and we're creating communities, posts and comments, contributing to apps and running instances. We'll spend our time and effort improving the tools and communities for the fediverse ready. Hopefully, with enough of reddit being reddit causing more waves of people in the future to seek another platform, the fediverse will grow and reddit will dwindle. That's my hope anyway.
The big picture here is we are escaping slow enshitification.
Reddit is incentivised to make a worse user experience.
Fediverse is incentivised to make a better user experience.
For now, the UX of reddit overall is probably still better than that of the fediverse for casual users. We are here now because we are either a) not a casual user, or b) anticipating the trend.
Most people are neither of these things. We have to accept it. And it's ok! This is how all movements start and look like from the inside, including the internet and Reddit itself.
OP If you want Lemmy to grow do your part to make it welcoming. Make an app or submit a PR. Volunteer to moderate. Post. Comment. Even just upvoting helps. Make the place welcoming.