I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence

That’s not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users’ usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you’re from, so really you can’t actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.

:o

Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be “hurt” by not having access to Lemmy’s memes about Linux and similar stuff.

just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them

Except that theoretically my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.

Yeah, but they’re separate

They’re literally not.

Threads accounts are closely integrated with Instagram accounts. By default, Threads and Instagram accounts share the same username, profile picture, and display name, although the profile picture and display name can be customized. Users can choose which accounts they follow on Instagram will carry over to Threads, either with the other person’s Threads account already created or set to automatically follow them once an account is created.[36] As of August 2023, if a user decides to terminate their Threads account, they must delete their associated Instagram account as well.[37] Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, has acknowledged this limitation and stated that they are exploring options for a user to delete only their Threads account.[38]

Users are required to have an Instagram account to use Threads. Threads is a companion app to Instagram, and it uses Instagram to authenticate the user’s identity and connect with their network.[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(social_network)

Elon didn’t say he would charge all the X/Twitter users.

What do you mean by that? He didn’t say he was definitely going to do so right now, but he proposed it with quite some degree of seriousness. I don’t intend to watch the whole video with Netanyahu to make sure what he said exactly, but all the articles I’ve seen are too detailed and explicit for it to be just an aside that the media blew out of proportion.

Regarding the analogy:

1. it’s not one but multiple connected rooms

2. the room with people in red shirts has suddenly decided to connect with the rooms with the less numerous blue and green shirts

3. it’s not “someone” in a blue shirt, it’s a significant number of people in blue shirts who think the red ones should simply return to their own room that they were perfectly happy with until now

We were invited to join the discussion

https://lemm.ee/post/4543536

Where exactly do you see the invitation? I see “I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users.”

It certainly wouldn’t be brigading if the ratio of hexbear comments was proportional to its size. But I haven’t seen many lemmy.world comments there, for example, and they saw the thread in their feeds just as much as you did.

That’s how federation works, is it not?

Federation works by connecting various instances with different goals and different userbases. Those instances need a space to discuss those goals among themselves, where the admins can communicate with the users, etc. Some external engagement is to be expected, but one specific instance creating 3x more comments than all the others taken together (including the instance whose policy is supposed to be discussed) should, uh, raise an eyebrow.