$0.99 per month to read all the comments on a thread, slowly increase the cost year-over-year and eventually add a second (initially) $0.99 per month to read any comments at all (because you should only read posts and only the ones we want you to see).

Try using the Progressive Web App (PWA) instead. I’m on iOS and haven’t found a good app for Lemmy yet but the PWA has helped me get used to Lemmy on my phone in place of Reddit. You just open the site in your phone’s native browser (Safari on iOS, probably Chrome on Android?) and choose “Save to Home Screen”. Now it looks like any other app and behaves like it too, even though it’s secretly just the web page.

Back in the day (pre-2015 or so) Reddit used to feel a lot different. Odds are, a lot of the big-name mods came into power back then. It’s been a real slow “boil the frog” type approach for many years as they slowly made the logged out user experience worse, then the “new reddit” experience worse… and now the mobile apps.

If you weren’t paying attention, it was really easy to fall into a routine where you believed the site’s operators still had the users’ best interests at heart. Especially if your subscriptions only brought you posts from older subreddits that managed to retain that old feeling. I could see someone wanting to moderate that for free, even if it was out of a naïve belief that it was possible to return to the old days of Reddit.

That being said, they’ve really gone full mask off as of late. Hard to imagine anyone could return to moderating that for free. The glory days of Reddit are definitely behind us. Here’s hoping Lemmy manages to keep the momentum going. So far, it really does feel like the old days on Reddit.