What would the larger Reddit userbase need to experience to actually move to a decentralised, community-owned alternative (given the recent third-party-app discouragement)?

Recently, Reddit has announced, that third-party-apps using the Reddit-API will have to pay (t)hefty amounts to access the data. The amount paid will be much much more, that what Reddit usually earns per user on their platform via Ads etc. It's less about "earning" the money they miss out on the 3rd-party-users, and more about simply ending all 3rd-party-apps and making the official app the only way to use Reddit. (I wouldnt't be surprised, if old.reddit would eventually also fall).

While some Twitter users have moved to Mastodon (which is community-owned), most of the activity is still on Twitter afaik. And this needed a big controversial figure such as Elon Musk to inavde Twitter.

For Reddit, I fear, that most people don't care much about the 3rd-party-apps and will not "boycott" Reddit. (Or I might be wrong. The situation is still developing. Maybe there will be a boycott!)

This situaton isn't particularly new. As the saying goes. If you don't pay for a service (Reddit), oyu are the product (specifically your data and attention on ads).

I am asking myself, what would it take for the larger Reddit community to move to a truely community-owned alternative to Reddit? I mean, even in this crypto-space here, we're using lots of non-community-owned services. Reddit. Discord. Twitter. etc. We can expect that even less from the broader Reddit userbase.

And it's not like we didn't already have community-owned alternatives. Email started out as a great decentralised service. However, over the past two decades Email has become quite centralised - and only a few services such as Mcrosoft, Google, etc. accept each others email servers. It's almost impossible to have your own email server running and get other servers accept your emails - even if you do everything right.

IRC (open-standards based chat) is slightly better, as you can more easily host your own node and have people use it. But the chat servers don't really work together and it's more that each server has it's own sphere of community and ownership. Also, it's not really comparable to Discord, Telegram, etc. in terms of adoption.

So, it seems like, that community-owned / decentralised software hasn't been working in the past as well. At least, thesy haven't really gotten big adoption. The only exception might be the open web standards (HTML, etc.). It was horrible, when Internet Explorer 6 had 95% market share and peolpe were focusing on it entirely - but the same problems visible today with browsers based on Googles blink-engine being at over 90% of market share.

I have the impression, that not enough people has really understood how important it is to have community-owned applications. Getting Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. community-owned with open-source software which is run distributed isn't too hard. It's hard however, to compete with all the nice and shiny and "easy UX" that these companies offer.

There is an analogy to the financial system. Most of the time you don't incur any costs of being ignorant of self-cusdoty of your funds and of being ignorant of how the financial system works. Except for instances like 2008 and 2023 banking crisis, where suddenly it does matter and you see, how much you traded resillience for efficiency and comfort.

I think the same can be said for platforms like centralised Email, broker-based Stock Ownership, Corporation-based Social Media (Reddit, Twitter, etc.). However, there the difference is, that we don't have anywhere near the amount of awareness about the costs of giving up resillience and community-ownership.

This leads me to the main question of this post. What do you think needs to happen, such that the broader community (say on Reddit) agrees to move to a community-owned platform?

What do you think are the most important factors making the decision for the people?

I have the impression, that the community simply gravitates to the best platform which offers the values of the community. On Reddit the discussion format and user engagement is important. And currently Reddit provides the biggest platform for all kinds of small niche communities with a great deal of UX and performance.

Maybe having a good alternative which is easy to use and performs well, while being community-owned, is all we need?