In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
I asked a few subs why they didn’t just point people to a clone community on Lemmy during the blackout. They said that Lemmy was too confusing for new users.
…sounds like a load of bs to me. I think the mods just like the way reddit works from the modding end and/or don’t want to lose their communities to other mods. Kind of immature if that’s the case, but I wouldn’t be surprised.