I guess it's fine that 15 years ago the users chose Reddit due to the lack of good alternatives. But today people should be aware of the problem and go to decentralized platforms.

Once you've built a community and a "library" though, as we see, it's hard to up and move it. At least, until the guy who owns the library threatens to burn it all down.

The whole damn point of the internet is that the "library" never ever ever actually MUST be "owned."

Since when? Every website on every server going back to the very first one at CERN has been owned by someone.

Seems like it should be relatively clear that when I say "owned" here, I mean "strongly subject to the whims of a possibly capricious owner."

Like, sure, university libraries are "owned" by the school, but one can generally reliably treat them as "public."

Every server is strongly subject to the whims of a possibly capricious owner. One cannot reliably treat any website as "public" because it really isn't. At the end of the day it's one or more boxes plugged into a wall you can't access one which one or more people other than yourself has admin and root privileges. It's someone else's property. Not yours, not "the public's."

That may be the intent of some of the early founders, and it may be your and my preference, but it definitely isn't what has ever existed.