It surprises me a little, because on some instances there seems to be a lot of power users/tech influencer types, but not a lot of engagement between smaller accounts. Active users is around 1 in 12, which is again higher than expected, so maybe it’s just me/Hackyderm?

Several reasons:

• Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
• Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
• The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
• Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?

I had been active on Reddit for close to 15 years, and left due to the API decisions. That move feels more justified every time I bump into Reddit, from being unable to view programming questions from a work VPN, to the emails begging me to invest in their IPO, to their exec pay fiasco.

Reddit is a shell of what it was, but I think this is largely due to stepping away from it. I know several people that use it religiously, and they don’t notice it as much as I do.

In a similar vein, Lemmy can have some absolutely batshit views too, and can also be incredibly toxic at times. We just don’t notice it as much because we’re used to it, but I bet some people new to Lemmy would see some posts/comments and think “eh, no thanks”. I won’t say that Lemmy is as toxic as Reddit, but the community size makes it more obvious on Reddit.

I don’t want Lemmy to go after Reddit. I want it to be its own thing.

With that being said, more users would mean having some living communities. Some major communities on lemmy.world like videos are hilariously empty, probably less so than small, local subreddits.

Web3 is a thing in the same way that the Semantic Web was a thing - it wasn’t.

The same goes for federation. There isn’t a single leading service, and until it is a proven idea that the whole web leans towards, it’s just a theory or a grift.

How about you fuckers stop grifting buzzwords?

Until there is an actual shift towards any form of federation, where it becomes the standard for the web, the web is still basically what it’s been for many years. Web3 is bullshit, and trying to lump federation in with it is a fast-track towards shitting over any benefits that it might have to people.

Given that we’ve watched communities like Reddit become more closed, I would rather Lemmy not do the same. The best thing an instance can do is keep them on a very tight leash, and kick out at the first sign of a rule being broken.

What Lemmy needs, above anything, is engagement. Be open to the users from Threads, instead of punishing them because you hate Meta. Many people joined Lemmy because the idea of the fediverse meant freedom to choose, and while instances are free to allow/deny who they want, it shouldn’t be a detriment to users that want to experience Lemmy.

To be fair, Microsoft didn’t invent this, they only showed that it could be implemented in the tech industry. To some extent, basically every big tech company does this now.

The only right choice here, although as a filthy southerner, I haven’t seen dandelion and burdock for years!