Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.

The cynic in me says they didn’t actually fuck up. The AI being horny brought more attention to it and playing it off like “oh no! it went rogue!” gives them even more headlines. All a strategic play.

I don’t really like the logic of “chatbots like this will help cure loneliness.” It might help someone feel less lonely at first. But then it’ll be a crutch and, if anything, hurt people’s ability to socialize with other real people. Like it’s a quick dopamine hit that will slowly dig you deeper into the hole you feel you’re in.

I can see comments and posts on their profile from communities I’m not in. Not quite sure why that isn’t the case for you. Maybe a weird quirk of how the different instances are federated. Looks like they’re talking about [email protected]. As for finding communities, I don’t know what the UI is like outside of Beehaw, but when I go to the community list I can chose to search all instances to find communities all over.

It’s neat to see them using ActivityPub, but I’m really wary of anything created under the Meta/Facebook umbrella. We’ll have to wait and see if they decide to act in good faith with this which my biases make me doubtful they will.

Also, if they’re using ActivityPub, why would I have to join if I can just loop in with my existing Mastodon account?