It's a reference to the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where:

a) the number 42 plays a significant role b) the towel is hailed as the most useful thing a galaxy hitchhiker could possibly posses.

So Don't Panic and don't forget your towel :)

yeah sure. but for the larger communities like r/funny that's gonna take some leg work. You don't just reopen a 40 million user subreddit without a substantial amount of mods. That's not even thinking about the abysmal state of modding tools and death of modding tools due to API pricing.

That's actually a great point. Haven't really done much posting on reddit for the past couple of years but really enjoy the more intimate feel of lemmy atm. We'll see how it all pans out but I yearn for the old phpbb days of the internet :D

Really curious to see how long the more popular subreddits will remain private. Surely the admin won't just turn them public again without having any mods, right? I kinda would love to see that dumpster fire.

Thanks for the link! Really interesting to see how many already went dark. Can confirm that my frontpage doesn't look anywhere near what is usually looks like.

Totally agree. Scrolling through reddit this morning was different. We'll see how the fediverse will deal with the influx of users that is to be expected in the next two days :)