Just upthread someone pointed out that after the Homelab subreddit set up a Lemmy instance, only 18 people joined it. I think this undermines the idea that Reddit communities care about this.

What we know is that people who spoke up about this care about it. People who voted in a handful of subreddit-run polls care. But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. They'll just ... remain silent, and wait for the storm to blow over. Which seems to be what the majority of Reddit users are doing.

Disclosure: I'm a 12+ year Reddit "power" user, and I don't care about the API changes. I didn't vote in any supposed polls on the changes. My perspective no doubt affects my understanding of this issue.

Maybe some did but the support is vastly overblown. r/nba did a poll (never stickied it) and 8,000 people voted. 72% in favor of privating the subredddit. On a random Thursday afternoon it has 33,000 people online. And the polls were posted in r/modcoord.

There were communities on Reddit that did a poll in Discord on whether or not they should go private. Given the where and who the audience was, what voices do you think were ‘overwhelming’ representative?

In the end it was a way for many moderators to hijack a community and transfer it to their next pet social space (Discord seems to be the current favorite).

That "overwhelming support" was likely brigaded by Discord as well as other subs, linked below.

Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.

https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14ae739/this_...

https://preview.redd.it/qty5883w6h6b1.png?auto=webp&v=enable...

https://preview.redd.it/c7o7zce1tb6b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...

Admins going rogue?

Admins are employees of reddit.com. I think you're talking about moderators, who are the volunteer petty tyrants that have always been the worst thing about reddit, and they are the ones "going rogue".