Building some community of 1000 people is a complete waste of time, if it starts to get traction the powerjannies will unlock their own communities and maintain their personal power/influence.
There simply is no circumstance where building a replacement community to bypass the powerjannies' control will be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
If there is a feeling that this is a loud minority waving pitchforks and that subreddits that re-open largely go on unaffected... the move to bypass the minority has to come from reddit themselves, otherwise the powerjannies will just regroup and come at it a bit more subtly once they realize they're on the losing side. They ain't gonna give up that mod slot when they know how much personal power it affords them.
And people can say there isn't power in it, or they're in it for the community, but, this kind of "keeping it closed for everyone because some users don't want it to be open" is exactly the kind of thing that gets a powermod all bricked up. There's enough power for some people to get a thrill out of it.
The current protest falls into a perceived gap in the "inactive sub" rules - if a sub is inactive and the mods are gone, that sub can be reassigned to new mods and reopened. The mods are saying "no, we're not inactive... we're just not letting anyone talk, but, there's 1 post a week in a private thread, see?". And the reality is that even if you accept that's a valid gap in the rules (arguably this is already covered by mod reassignment rules) this certainly will not be allowed to persist forever, Reddit will simply change the rules around what constitutes abandonment. The pressure is already on from community members who don't feel represented and are willing to take over the mod work if the current mods simply no longer wish to mod under the new system:
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
You can protest at the factory gate all you want, and shame people for "crossing the picket line". You can't obstruct the actual factory floor, and if that happens the cops will remove you. And that's what things are fast coming to with the whole situation.
Mods are free to not mod. Users are free to not post. That's the "protest at the gate" approach. You can't be disruptive on a commercial platform, or you're gonna get removed. If mods no longer wish to participate and abandon the platform, Reddit is perfectly free to execute its "abandoned subreddit" procedures and reopen the sub, or to alter those abandoned-subreddit procedures in any way they want. If users/mods wish to behave in a disruptive fashion because they don't want to be members anymore, they will be banned.
And yes, there are people willing to step in and do the work too. Powermods are not that special, actually they're kinda awful at times.
