I don't think that Reddit is going down, but i have seen users that post regularly on Reddit closing down their accounts and joining Lemmy, this will snowball into more joining Lemmy because the quality of post will eventually go down on Reddit and go up on Lemmy, this is just speculations and have a really lose base.
The communities you love are made of people, and people will go to someplace better. When googleplus ended, it was a mess in the initial migration. But soon people agreed to stick to better places, and the communities survived. Reddit is just a venue that used to be nice to hang out with friends and now is turning into a shopping center. It's annoying to change venues, but real friends will stick togheter.
Reddit was never going to just shut down overnight, but it's more or less done for me (barring some sudden change with the API stuff, but even then I'd make an effort to use it less). I'll keep my account around and might occasionally go to it to look up specific things or visit more niche communities that don't have much of a presence here or on other alternatives yet, but I'm done with just generally browsing reddit or providing any content for them. I'm enjoying it here and hope the boost in activity allows for continued growth and filling out of communities for more specific topics.
A return to normality is impossible since there will be no more third party apps. It may seem like things are as they were besides that, but the progressive move by Reddit to ignore Reddit's core value proposition (link aggregation and commenting) will continue, only to be replaced by attention towards monetisation-centric features no one asked for like NFTs & followers (which the third party apps ignored, gee I wonder why).
Reddit has a cancer. You can either stay in denial and experience the terminal death in slow, painful motion, or you can just move on now.
Yeah, followers were at-least majority spam over on Reddit. I primarily did politics and gaming over there... most of the accs following me were just advertisements for OnlyFans
I don't think there has to be a consensus alternative. People are finding different spaces. For some it's this, for others it's raddle or Tildes...
I think part of the problem with reddit is it got too big. It might be a good thing if things become less centralized.
I mode 3 subs on reddit. my biggest is 75k but i only get like 4 post a day from my biggest sub. It's a big sub to me. we went dark on the 12th I checked reddit yesterday quickly and looked like in mod-mail I had a join request. I can only hope that Reddit takes notice of us and changes it's tune. Lemmy is awesome and I hope it gets better and surpasses Reddit