"run it however you want"
This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.
This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.
Most bans are for really terrible communities, and yes, for a few of them, I think it went a bit too far, I wouldn't have banned the_donald for instance, despite not wanting to have anything to do with them. Really, they do the minimum acceptable for a mainstream service.
Only if you subscribe to the group think.
The truth is that reddit is one of the largest collection of bigots on planet earth.
You cannot do anything meaningful on the platform to contact users to let them know you've moved
And it's not like users couldn't have had contacts between each other and the moderators and couldn't spread the word about the new community.
That's not to mention the ability to evade bans to spread the word on Reddit itself, if need be.
Spreading the word is actually the relatively easy part... it's migrating all the old content to the new site that isn't made easy by Reddit, because (afaik) it doesn't offer any kind of export feature.. but the site could be scraped.