No, and that's not what the question is about. Let me rephrase the question for clarity:

Reddit just started requiring logins to use old.reddit, the first step in it's eventual shutdown. Is lemmy ready for new users the inevitable swarms of locusts? Can we prevail when the calamities foretold fall upon us, when our rivers turn to blood and the skies open up to drench our lands in acid? Or shall we perish? Drown under the great flood of liberal talking points that will wash over our lands?

I imagine the contingent of reddit users who are still browsing exclusively via Old Reddit is pretty small. And the subset of that group who feels strongly enough to abandon reddit altogether for the Fediverse is even smaller. If there's any influx of new Lemmy users from this change, I think it will be hardly noticeable. Most users will just start finally browsing using the regular site.

Not all, some, the ones with 3 digit IQ

Not all of them but definitively some?

Regardless of whatever app you may be using (I’m just using a web browser), the threadiverse is not an app.

You know there are a good number of compatible apps out there, right? I say this only because you might not, and should be made aware if so.

"We need you to login to help identify bots!"

"We need your photo ID to stop bots from making new accounts!"

I will steal that last half sentence of you, thank you very much.

the last wave proved that they're not, but i bet they'll make a pit stop before returning to us empire capture media like many did in the last surge.

Me too

You can use redlib to view reddit without an account still.

Before they started nerfing it you could set it up to show you 100 posts at a time, and reading the comments in a post would load them all at once so you could click down a list of posts across multiple subreddits, open the ones you thought might be interesting in new tabs, then read at your leisure. You filtered by just scrolling more, and could do this without creating an account.

Now they do all this "for safety" stuff, where you have to use Baby's First Web Interface to look at a few comments that are so milquetoast that it'd be hard to call it a discussion at all. I'm sure it's just coincidence that the changes also force click after click after click to see more posts which can be used as proof that it's a user engaging (I guess?) and not a robot.

It used to be seriously nice to read through comments, come across a word or concept that you didn't really understand at the time, then go back and search the full text of all the comments for that word again. Folding comments killed that.

For some, especially veteran users, the UI is more familiar. It's also more predictable and less prone to bugs than the new UI, and especially the glitch-laden official app.

Also, there's less ads. I don't see any ads on old.reddit but that might be uBlock Origin at work.

Thanks stranger!