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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • An old internet saying is “if it’s free, you’re the product”, and that’s exactly the problem platforms like reddit are currently encountering. Users leave, delete their old posts, and move elsewhere.

    It’s also a problem Lemmy/kbin see, from the other side: you need a critical mass of users to generate enough content to keep running and attracting and keeping users.

    Given enough time, the corps will just continue going down the drain, since they’re 100% profit-driven, and short-term gains over long-term sustainability. We here just have to keep going, and preferably in a way that minimizes drama. If one of the big 5 shits the bed and takes a lot of communities with it, the now homeless users might be hesitant to just join somewhere else, at least partially.

    That’s why I found it very unfortunate that beehaw defederated from .world and .works – it also happened at a very bad point in time, in the middle of a boom.

    If the platform matures enough, and the userbase is stable, it will most certainly grow over time, as the corpo options get worse and worse over time.

    We also have to be vigilant and isolate all bad actors immediately. The extremist instances, like lemmygrad and exploding-heads, and the corporate assimilators, like Meta. Else people will not join here, either because we have a bad rep, or because we just get swallowed and spit out again by a tech giant.

    I believe a “unique identity” will develop organically, given enough time.