> Why don’t we just fork it?

There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.

The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.

Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.