The quality has held despite a drop in users.

I feel like I’m going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I’ve noticed more and more posts linking to awful “news” rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.

And yes I’m mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I’d love to interact with non-news content there just… isn’t much being made.

It doesn’t have to be, but by nature of anyone being able to spin one up, people will end up on hobby instances.

Traditional social media is run for-profit and thus has an incentive to keep their website online as much as possible to keep their company alive by gaining users and revenue. And I would bet they do have backups. Hobby websites like fediverse projects often are can be run by any flaky nobody that can have varying motives and varying data retention practices.

In this nazi analogy it would be less of buying chairs and more the nazis giving away chairs for free that come with blueprints so if the nazis started installing spikes in their chairs people can just build their own from the blueprints, they just choose not to because it’s a lot of work. Which is fine if you don’t want those chairs, but a lot of people are fine with those chairs as long as the nazis don’t start any camps.

that statement has been used so universally sarcastically that no one believes you’re being serious when you say it now.

The best way to find groups is actually https://lemmyverse.net/communities . All individual servers are missing other communities due to de-feds or lack of federation. While I can’t say numerically how comprehensive Lemmyverse is, it’s a lot better than any instance I’ve tried.

All seem like improvements to me.

I’m going to disagree on this one, I’ve seem far too many comments, especially from LW users, along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to change websites because I’m already settled in.” Most people are attached to their posts and content and consider moving instance as “losing progress”. And the bigger an instance is the harder it’ll be to leave if they ever pull something seriously “power trippy” that could lock off content to some people, because there will be a large mass of communities and posts on that instance.