They probably already do.

Kbin is pretty nice, but sometimes it feels like it is… a bit too nice? Clean UI, better uptime, but also seems a little bit more closed. Makes me feel a little paranoid. Is there a corporation running it?

Very patient for sure

A variety of fandom and franchise-based communities, some artistic communities, some more specific sub-communities like Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.

Redditor-level rudeness sure showed up quickly though

Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.

No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.

Then don’t get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!

Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.

I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that’s my responsibility. It’s not exactly welcoming or motivating.

There is a middle ground between “infinite doomscrolling” and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren’t taking roots here. Losing more people isn’t a good sign.

Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.

It’s reductionist, but it gets to the point that it’s not an abstract everlasting resource, it’s a system that’s not under your control, so it might not be always reliable. So people should be wary of service discontinuations, rules and price changes.

The point can be distilled even further, the cloud is someone else’s.

Only if people consistently choose to subscribe to Meta creators and communities over the ones on the Fediverse. It’s not like people here will be auto subscribed to whatever infiniscroll algorithmic slop Meta is serving. Meta can’t forcibly implement that into other instances.

If Meta means to use the ActivityPub as a selling point, they need to show at least some of it to their users. But if they give up entirely, then there’s no need to worry about defederating anyway.

That said I’m not naive and I expect that Meta will try to play dirty, but it seems to me like the extent of what they can do is pretty limited by the decentralized structure of the Fediverse. They can’t just take other instances over, unless they downright buy the admins, and that’s a whole separate matter than federation. If they do, still, it’s trivial for users to jump into another instance away from Zuck’s scaly hands.

But even then, if it’s so easy to attract people away from the Fediverse, then it means that there is something it is lacking, and that’s not going to be solved by being reclusive and trying to stay beneath notice.

Comes to mind that personally I had no commitment to Jabber or Pidgin, it was only a means to talk to people I wanted to talk, which I remained able to do after they were dropped. But Lemmy and Mastodon are communities, it takes more than tinkering with the protocol to kill it.

They would have to convince people who are here because they are already sick of Big Tech social media, that going back to Meta, of all places, is the right move. If they can do that, then it’s not a matter of EEE or whatever, it’s that we failed to maintain a compelling community.

I believe in this place more than that. Which is why I believe that if integration came to pass, it’s more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.