For the record, reddit had more traffic than Digg before "the exodus". We had about double their traffic. There was a slight jump at that time, but for the most part most Digg users were already reddit users, they just became more active.

I doubt that it will happen exactly like this. Reddit has become a behemoth that caters more to the average consumer of social media than to the original tech crowd that represented its first members.

The only way a new platform can compete with them is by having the individual communities of reddit move to it with individual governance and then, allowing these communities to interact with each other in some way. The alternatives that look promising today are based on ActivityPub, but they fall into the same trap that reddit has: they want to appeal and attract as many users as possible without regard for suitability or community building. I'm hoping that the ting I'm working on will be better, but I'm not there just yet.

not possible anymore. a platform that has reddit-tier moderation policy from the get-go would never gain traction