The main problem with the protest is that there’s no viable Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for everyone to jump ship to Reddit.
There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or even just old fashioned webrings to start with.
Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose discoverability.)
Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site.
What is a better alternative to Reddit from the point of view of a community mod? Self-hosting a phpBB forum isn't it, it's way too much work.
reddit became substantially better when digg ruined their product. actually, digg didn't work at all when they rolled out their new version, so it was (approximately) infinitely better.