Without downvotes, you get Twitter where even obvious rage bait drowns out everything. Downvotes aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than not having them.

Unfortunately if the U.S. gets really bad, everywhere will get really bad. If Trump does putin’s bidding, then it will creat power vacuums around the world and will lead to wars. Leaving might be less safe than staying.

Or it won’t be as bad as predicted and it will just be very bad. Then I’m not sure.

Software development is never profitable?

Sorry, that was a big typo in my comment. That’s what I meant. I don’t want mastadon to only have true believers. I want more of everyone and Facebook will use EEE strategies to bootstrap threads off of mastadon and then harvest everyone but the true believers away.

Threads user numbers are misleading because of how easy it is to make an account and be counted as a user due to all of the instagram tie-in.

You keep saying that people must not “trust” threads users if they think Facebook could EEE and I don’t really get what that means. I don’t honestly want mastadon to only be for true believers. It’s more interesting if a wider range of people are on there.

What is considered bigotry often is a difference of opinion though.

I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears, but here. Threads is lacking in content. Threads gets fediverse content. Instagram promotes that content, getting people to sign up and actually use it. This includes big name content creators and celebrities, authors, journalists. People on mastodon and the fediverse get used to that content. Threads starts supporting some new features or longer length or who knows what in threads. These posts are either omitted from the fediverse or are degraded to be fediverse-compatible. This annoys fediverse users who have gotten used to all the content they are now missing or seeing degraded. A significant number of them move to threads.

And on the content creator side. Threads gains a huge market share. Content creators on mastodon get used to all the threads viewers threads decides to add enhanced security or formatting requirements or some other nonsense that regularly stops mastadon creators’ content from being seen or interacted by threads users. Or threads starts heavily deprioritizing mastadon content. Either way, the mastadon creators decide to go where the audience they got used to is o threads leaving mastadon behind.

Or something more clever than either of those. Because we know meta would want to EEE if they can and there are people who will be cleaver at doing it.

I’m definitely not saying there’s something wrong with the Lemmy software. But the reality is that most hobbies don’t have active communities here.

I like helping people and talking about things other people are interested in more than I like raising topics or asking questions. I feel weird about showing off a new thing, but am happy to talk about someone else’s new thing.

I like Lemmy for the communities it has. But the problem is that it doesn’t have the communities that I like most. I liked Reddit most for the hobby communities that aren’t all necessarily programming or gaming related. Lemmy is fantastic for memes and news and programming and gaming. But those are a small portion of what I used Reddit for. And they aren’t even my favorite part. Look at true guitar communities. Or astronomy, or any other hobby. It’s extremely inactive here.

So I found myself using Lemmy a lot. And then I realized that I was only using Lemmy for the things I don’t actually care about and the things I do care about aren’t here.