I'm all for leaving the broken arms and dead wife at Reddit, but "and my axe" predates Reddit, and as a meme/inside joke originated on 4chan. I'm pretty sure that's just part of the internet at large at this point.
I have to imagine with today being the day the boycott starts that the servers here are absolutely swamped. Every new site has growing pains. When I came here to try it out I made a point of consciously reminding myself of that fact. I'm sure it'll improve with time.
Two questions: Is there any plan to add the ability to collapse comment chains? That's, like, the one big UI thing from Reddit that I'm missing. The other question is, is having the comment box for adding a top level comment at the bottom an intentional design choice, to encourage people to read the threads before commenting? I think at the very least adding a shortcut to take users to the comment box near the top would go a long way to improving usability.
Other than that, if the goal is to be a replacement for Reddit refugees, my first impressions are that this has the right recipe. Very impressive work so far.
The AI excuse is a smokescreen. If it was really just about fleecing the AI bros they could have made a tiered system where free API access is rate-limited. The AI trainers "read" millions of times faster than people, so a paid access that lets them read that quickly would absolutely be worth paying for. This has always been about killing apps that don't give Reddit absolute control over what you see.