There have been a couple of these, though this one is new to me!

It always makes me sad that they never seem to gain much traction. It seems like disconnected from a larger platform (and potentially the exclusive time window?) they never draw many users.

Just like r/place 😎

This is also why those power strip lights can sometimes flicker in the dark. They are sometimes over-driven for extra brightness; this does cut their lifespan, but they usually still last for many years regardless. However, towards the end of that shortened lifespan, the accumulated damage to the electrodes leads to flickering as it struggles to keep the neon excited. However, incoming photons can give just a little extra nudge, which sometimes is enough to keep the neon excited and glowing.

https://ttrpg.network/ for all things TTRPG!

On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.

Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.

Only 1 for 3 there myself, but I get the point.

One thing I have noticed is a big chunk of the memes posted earlier in June were very dated, ~2010-era Facebook style. Made me wonder if the crowd on here didn’t at least initially skew older.

In fairness for Mastodon, apparently you can migrate instances without starting a new account, unlike Lemmy.

The Fediverse is built on ideals of open source, privacy, decentralization, controlling your own experience and your own data, etc…

How is Fediverse built on privacy and “controlling your own data”? Essentially every action you take on here is public, and there’s no way to ensure all federated servers respect deletion requests. As it currently stands, the Fediverse has fundamental flaws with privacy.

I’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.

The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.

I honestly don’t think Meta even cares about the Fediverse as we know it. Mastodon barely cracked 2.5m active monthly users in late 2022/early 2023, and the Fediverse user counts had been dropping until the Reddit debacle. There’s no way they are agile enough to push this out the door in response to what happened in June, and this is a lot of effort to kill something already in decline with only 0.01% your active monthly user base.

Even so, what do they gain by killing Mastodon? Paying for the dev work and the server cost to host their own instance? All the data on the Fediverse that they’d want to sell is publicly accessible anyway; they could grab/sell it all without going through this effort. I think they see long term value in the ActivityPub protocol, and they are positioning themselves to get ahead of any other major corporate ActivityPub-based platform.

I suspect the intention is that if another major platform appears (BlueSky, anyone?) that it will pressure them to also implement ActivityPub, thereby increasing the pool of data on the Fediverse and letting Meta analyze and sell it too.

More devices, content, and people are online than ever before, and the user experience has never been worse. It is one of the most significant advancements in human history, and its not-so-slowly going to shit because of corporate greed.

It’s Google’s right to serve ads however they want, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call for a competitor that doesn’t treat users like garbage.