Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

No, the first step was all the governments literally forcing them and all the other big social media sites through legislation to add age verification. It makes it much easier to throw people in jail for online wrong-think if they have to verify who they are.

I haven’t touched reddit in years, and I have no sympathy for anyone still using that garbage site, so doesn’t bother me that they’re getting rid of the only good way to view it on a desktop. It won’t change anything, most reddit traffic is through the apps.

lemmit.online

I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.

They don't have to stick it at the same prefix, so there's no reliable way to check by just guessing the name.

It looks like p.lemmy.world is running the Photon frontend. On lemmy.today, we have it at photon.lemmy.today.

Lemmy.today lists the alternate frontends in the instance sidebar, but there's no requirement for an instance to do that.

The inertia is too large.

Myspace, Digg and Slashbot thought that too. Look at FB basically a bot farm like reddit. Something new will come along, maybe its Lemmy, it was Voat for a second. Discord, IG, TikTac have all be chipping away at them.

They all will fall down if they over reach.

Not being combative, its just how this goes imo.

reddit cant afford [the V3 captcha system] but google lets them use it in exchange for AI/datamining

Had no idea they used that. I edited all my comments to crap then deleted them around the time the admin monkied with the backend database, and stopped using old.reddit to browse once I found lemmy. I once went through the effort of making a temp account to comment on someone else's comment there because they had suggested trying something specifically dangerous and didn't seem to know about it. I doublechecked later and the comment I wrote was caught in some filter, likely the result of the account being too new. I can't imagine what garbage that site will be in the years to come.

Got to shout Redlib from the rafters.