Honestly, mods should just force the issue and make Reddit replace them. It's going to be a big problem if Reddit needs to find new moderators for hundreds if not thousands of subreddits. And that's assuming all the new moderators will play along and not immediately join the protest, go on a tyrannical power trip, or just go dark after a few weeks.
Why would anyone even want to be a mod right now? It's like your boss threatening to fire you from a job you're not paid for while the building is actively on fire.
Mod of /r/homeimprovement here, that's exactly what we are doing. We are staying dark and forcing them to replace us if that's what they want to do at this point. We are at least going to make them work for it, lol.
I get that some people will step up into being Mods, but modding is hard and thankless work - I've done it a few times over the years.
There's always subs crying out for new Mods, so you'll end up scraping the barrel for Mods, then the quality will go down, people will get pissed off. With thousands of Subs suddenly needing modding, there's simply not enough volunteers to go around.
One of Reddits unsung resources was its army of Mods keeping the content of some quality (define that as you will). Reddit really is cutting its nose off right now.
Out of curiosity, how likely do you expect those reddit mods to move to lemmy? I see a bunch of retiring mods posts, but not many that have said they were moving here.
There will be lag, sometimes significant lag, in moving I think. Remember, the protests were about trying to save Reddit, and, failing that, making it as obvious as possible that Reddit's about to shoot itself in the groin. People who have invested a decade or more building and running stable and growing communities kind of have to grieve the loss of the fruit of their labours.
I do think you'll see many of them show up here relatively soon, as users. But the prospect of rebuilding from near scratch will probably take a little more time for people to wrestle with.