Reddit (and by extension, Lemmy) likely wouldn’t exist without Kevin Rose. He both popularized the concept of user driven link aggregators and royally screwed digg during a big redesign, pushing the users to reddit.

Alexis Ohanian is generally considered a “better” cofounder of reddit (or atleast, not spez). I think the two combining forces to relaunch an OG site is newsworthy.

If it’s a positive, will remain to be seen. I won’t go back to a closed/non-federated platform, personally.