If you don't stay on Reddit where will you go? I'm eager to join communities that are moving to something less user hostile than Reddit. Bonus for anything OSS or federated.
That's not really decided yet. Without going into too much detail, a lot of our moderators are not as engaged as they once were: Eternal September has washed out many of our core contributers long ago, and the subreddit's focus has shifted over the years. Mostly to topics that (IMO) most mods don't care too much about (self-promotion, "beginner friendly content" instead of expert discussion, fluff...).
So in my view, most of the subreddit is in strong decline and is just not "the place it used to be". With several million subscribers, I feel like it's very hard to foster a real sense of community. And once you hit a certain popularity, the amount of newcomers will always be larger than the "core", and good content erodes from there. I guess that's true of a lot of reddit, though. We could've tried harder to prevent this (or guide our community), but at the time we felt that "hands off" was a better moderation approach, and now it's likely impossible to change that course.
Anyways, IMO most of the really interesting discussion on the topic happens on twitter already. My best guess is that instead of finding a new home for the subreddit, we'll eventually just either give control to some other body (or reddit takes it from us) or we'll just set the subreddit to public again and let it go its way without being very involved (Most of the current mods weren't really involved anymore anyways). I'd love to find a new place devoted to this topic (twitter definitely sucks for long form discussion), but I haven't found such a place, and don't have the time/energy to set one up myself.
