If the moderators decide to go private again, then Reddit will kick them out and replace them with someone who will toe the official Reddit line. ("Everything Reddit is doing is great and you'll be banned for saying differently!")

If the new moderators are horrible at their job, then Reddit won't care. They're betting on their site being large enough that a few subs going bad won't hurt them. They're also banking on there being no Reddit alternatives for users to flee to. (They don't see Lemmy as a threat just yet.)

I think we’re guilty of thinking that the number of people who think the way we do is larger than it is.

I don’t think that this is going to mean much to Reddit over the short to medium term. They literally have hundreds of millions of users. Reddit’s death will probably be slow, maybe in the same way as Facebook.

Honestly, I think the best hope for the fediverse is something like Hackernews or Stack Exchange…a robust community using a viable or future-proof platform.