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The source data shows that while active users are down, the number of posts and comments are near all-time highs. While you need new users to help counteract churn, I think the higher post/comments count points to what I think a lot of people feel here: that quality seems to keep getting better and better.
Regarding how to bring more people in, I personally like how different lemmy servers have slightly different characteristics but each seems to appeal to larger groups. I see a future where there’s probably a small-ish number of large servers that cover broad groups of people.
Because once the news broke of the Ellisons buying US TikTok (and their transparent reasons for doing so), it became clear to me that for the free and open internet, “winter is coming”.
Oct 7th and the global outpouring of support for Palestinians (and trashing of the reputation of Israel) was a huge wake-up call to the ruling classes. I think until then, they were largely content with controlling the narratives via traditional media spaces. The aftermath of Oct 7 taught them that social media and the internet cannot be ignored and in fact must controlled. It’s not like anyone under 65 is watching Fox News or CNN, and not many reading the NYT. All of the actions we have seen in the last 2 years - making sure Facebook / Google / Twitter / Reddit and now TikTok have tightly controlled messaging, requiring IDs and verification, etc - are pointing towards a future where free expression online is severely limited. I don’t want to be a part of that.
And I do believe that it’s important to get out there and discuss things that are important to me with others (Palestinian and indigenous liberation, communism, online privacy). I’m not happy to just retreat into my own bubble. That is ultimately the reason I joined (I was of course already included to using the fediverse as I’ve long appreciated FOSS and decentralized systems and non-commercialized things in general).
When George Lucas was filming A New Hope he did not have the notion developed that Vader was actually Luke’s father, and that he only came up with it after the movie was released. There is no actual foreshadowing of this, no hints, and really nothing in A New Hope would even point to this possibility. To say Vader “killed your father” but to really mean “uhhhh I meant the ‘Vader’ persona metaphorically ‘killed’ the person your father was” is such a ridiculous stretch I just don’t get why more people don’t ever call this out. The much more straightforward explanation is that Lucas came up with the idea as a way to build up drama in the movies that followed, after A New Hope was already out.