I don't feel heartbroken for reddit itself. But I do think there are a lot of small communities on reddit which will either have terrible trouble trying to continue surviving there, or which won't be able to reconstitute into the alternate ecosystem.

I imagine trying to migrate a community would be quite difficult even if you did have some very tech-savvy mods, and many mod teams will have no idea what this whole 'lemmy/kbin/beehaw' thing is.

So there's a number of communities that I think just aren't going to make it, and that's sad.

And yet, if Reddit backs off enough for people to continue moderating effectively, I think the damage to them in the short run will be relatively low. In the long-run this debacle has done a lot to drive people to the larger 'lemmy' community. Since that has help grow the federated alternative community, that could have lasting implications for reddit as they move forward with... whatever they're doing.