This is the exact the same as me - only still peruse Reddit because Relay is still kicking on, although I am 80 / 20 Lemmy to Reddit these days so I won't miss anything when Relay is completely dead.
Censorship is also decentralised which means no single entity will be able to completely control the information, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want without consequence of all the decentralised instances agreeing that particular information should not be shared. Decentralisation does not guarantee you an audience!
It's one thing to remove a feature, but another thing to announce it with communication along the lines of "we will replace it with something later". The third party API changes smelt the same "we are blocking access now but we will work out a subscription model later".
Makes me wonder if they actually have any kind of well thought out strategy or it's just a series of poorly thought out and poorly planned approaches to "make money". It screams of a mismanagement of direction to me.
I once worked with a senior dev who wrote all his array iteration for loops with no condition e.g "for int i = 0 ;; i++" and added an "if i == array.length then break" type condition to the end of every block... And he genuinely didn't see this as a problem at all.
This is the exact the same as me - only still peruse Reddit because Relay is still kicking on, although I am 80 / 20 Lemmy to Reddit these days so I won't miss anything when Relay is completely dead.