I agree, too many communities here keep getting meta discussion about Reddit - and the open community aspect of Lemmy isn't very organized.

That said...

This sort of change by the community isn't new. One of Twitter's great strengths was that it was an identifiable brand and you could tell someone a username and it was mostly unambiguous.

I remember the days when Usenet archive ran out of money, before Google purchased it back in early 2001: https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/ - searching Usenet archives was going to be lost.