It's probably not about the economics of remaining. Twitter's still got way more users than Bluesky.
But the optics of Bluesky are way better than the optics of Twitter, so you get to feel like you're sacrificing something (the larger user base) for your principles, while still having a huge (and engaged) audience.
They get to have their cake and eat it too. Until the crypto bros have their way with the place.
Community building involves more than just posting. It's "If you post it, post about it everywhere else, and talk about it with everybody who will listen". And then dealing with months if silence while you keep posting things that inspire others to join in.
Yeah. It's the same with Mastodon. "There are a bunch of toxic people making me feel unwelcome" can be met with "so I left" or "so we flooded the place and took over, because there were only lile 800 people there"
I wonder how much fuss would have to be put up in order to get nodeBB supporting it.
A lot of the small communities are not dead, they simply have a low post rate. If you actually post something of interest to them, they get engagement.
Social media suffers from the curse of the Pareto principle: The overwhelming majority of users do not generate content. They also suffer from the network effect: Most people will be where the content is, and most content creators will stay where the audience is. What we have on Lemmy is a group of people that skews more heavily toward consumption or commenting than posting new content, and the ever present thief of joy.
and the Fediverse in general
A significant number of the not-Lemmy-or-Mastodon servers support emoji and custom emoticon tags, not just 'up', 'down', or 'star'. I wish that was more widely adopted.
Cops aren't bastards because they randomly kill small children and pets. Cops are bastards because they enforce the social hierarchies and protect the rich from the masses.
They just also kill small children and pets sometimes. As a treat. And, as with most other forms of treats, Americans indulge more than those in many other places in the world.
Thing is, it can be great for niches! The Star Trek instance is very Star Trek. The TTRPG instance has a lot of potential. If we try to build the fediverse out from these niche nodes first, instead of starting from the general and trying to branch out, it could work a lot better than what we currently have.
But... but... but... Have you seen the stock market? The line's going up! Economy's fine!!1!
Yup. They had a hook with Walz and the 'weird' talking points. That seemed to really resonate with the Republicans and made them go out of their way to highlight out weird they were.
Then they pivoted to try and win Republicans. And... they died.
'Weird' probably wouldn't have won them the election or anything, but it was working. It could have been paired with good, short talking points about helping people, and Walz is a good enough, and genuine enough (or at least appears to be so) guy to really sell those talking points in a way that didn't feel pandering or cynical.
But they really wanted that right-wing vote. It's like right-wingers telling the Democrats that they'll never vote for them just makes the Dems want to win them over that much more.
It's wild.
Unfortunately, community building is work, and it's work that users actually do on the bigger, corporate sites. Those community builders helped get those spaces going, helped make them appealing, and help trap users there. In smaller spaces like this, we need to be the community builders, not just the content consumers.
One thing I find really helps is to use something that doesn't look like the space you left. Lemmy looks an awful lot like Reddit, but it has themes, and even alternative web clients that can change the experience and make it feel like something new.
Lemmy also isn't the content and communities, it's just the website's server software. You can access... ugh... the "threadiverse"... from websites using other ActivityPub enabled servers. There's an ActivityPub Discourse plugin. nodeBB is adding ActivityPub support in its next version. Friendica and Hubzilla have group support, and work with Lemmy-hosted communities.
Find a new window on social media, and it might help you engage with it differently.
The other thing you can do is just niche down a bit here. Find a few active communities that you're interested in, and focus your attention on them. Lemmy is actually much, much more like classic forums, where communities or spheres of interest have their own website. The difference here is that you can actually look outside of those communities to interact with other forums, too. It works a a lot better if you treat it that way. Find your home, as it were, and branch out from there.
Unfortunately, the modern mental model of social media is the fire hose, not the node-and-spoke that is actually best supported by the technology.
It's great for tabletop games if you join the tabletop gaming instance.
Or if you flood it with tabletop gaming fans.