I’m hoping the blackout drive fediverse adoption to the point that we don’t care what reddit is up to, any more than we don’t care about slashdot, digg, fark, et. al.

It’s libre, you can fork it and create your own if you want feature not in the main repo. “any lemmy change would have to go into their main repo” is not correct.

The cool thing about federation is someone could add this to their own instance

They can pitch a fit and protest all they want, but the only real way to get traction is to show there is a viable alternative. Want to renegotiate your Oracle license fees? Run a credible fraction of your enterprise on PostgreSQL. Want to get WotC to stop screwing 3rd party publishers with a new license? Start playing pathfinder. These are only two examples that I’ve experienced. Twitter will never improve as long as people keep using it. If reddit API users (3rd party apps) shift 5 to 20 % of use to Lemmy, you’ll see API pricing drop incredibly fast.