The moderators organizing the protest had been trying to organize their own thing for a while to port their communities over.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the "own thing" was untenable; too many differences to reconcile. Different mod teams had given up on the process and have already started to make places on Lemmy/Kbin.
Remaining closed is seemingly impossible; if you remain closed, Reddit will replace you within 24 hours). That's not a bluff; Reddit has done it (and is creating more and more powermods in the process as these big subreddits get centralized into the hands of giant powermods that cooperate with the admins).
With that in mind, they've decided the best way to damage Reddit is from within Reddit itself. Over the last couple days they've been putting together guidance on how to stay within the letter of Reddit's rules while maintaining the protest. Among that guidance is tips to make Reddit as miserable as possible while heavily promoting alternative communities. Everything is officially following Reddit's rules to the letter, so if the admins punish these communities they're proving those rules to be a farce.
A lot of places are now making the jump to alternate communities. Some are on the fediverse (here's a list), some aren't. But now it's "official" guidance from the protest leaders, so expect to see a lot more advertising for Lemmy/Kbin from subreddits that participated in the protest.
They can and have, is the thing.
There's been a few subs knocked out by Reddit giving the mod roles to a greedy powermod. Some "regular" mods are becoming powermods by playing nice with the admins and requesting huge subreddits.
Reddit isn't bluffing when they say "Open up or we will make you." Some teams are reporting less than 24 hours passing between them getting the "admins are knocking on your door" message and the mod team being removed and replaced with a powermod that moderates 100 other subreddits.
It's becoming obvious that you will be opened, like it or not. If mods want to continue to protest, they need to start doing malicious compliance. Subs are looking closely at Reddit's rules and following them to the letter.
Did you know Reddit considers heavy profanity to be NSFW? So you could mark your community as NSFW and use AutoMod to ensure that every post has a curse word in the title. Then since your community is obviously NSFW Reddit can't advertise on it, because ads don't run on NSFW subs.
Other mods are avoiding this approach in fears that Reddit will just ban NSFW entirely. Those are the John Oliver subs. Reddit says "it can't be a surprise what the sub is about" but clearly there's leeway because /r/trees isn't about trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts isn't about marijuana enthusiasts. Hence "only pictures of John Oliver"; if Reddit comes after that then they'd logically be banning /r/trees, /r/anime_titties, /r/196, etc. as well.
Reddit says that it's a democracy (it isn't, admins will always be dictators), and that users should decide the direction of the subreddit. Hence posts asking the users for their input. And of course they're only listening to the demands of the users, after all...
The only way to damage Reddit is from inside Reddit. Make Reddit a miserable experience. They're following all the rules! But it's not a good place to be. Then promote communities elsewhere (also perfectly within the rules) to push people off of Reddit and onto other sites.
And they're just doing exactly what the admins asked them to do, after all.