To be honest, I had such low expectations for the blackout, I'm actually surprised how much impact it did have. This was never going to be the reddit killer. There is a reason why the 1% principle exists. Most people don't care, and most people who do aren't going to actually put in the effort to change their browsing habits. It's part of why being an early member of new sites like these are the best, because the people joining are the people who are actively seeking out new communities.

I think there is probably a mix of things going on.

First, the angriest people already did leave.

Second, people suck at protesting. I mean, the entire reason it was a 2-day protest instead of defaulting to indefinite is because the idea of sacrificing your own habits in a protest blows people's minds. There is a reason "slacktivism" is a thing.

Third, there is probably a segment of the user base who basically got their addiction checked. Social media is addicting, and reddit is not exception, I mean, even I've kept habitually opening the site this whole week just cause that has been my browsing habit for over a decade. It's just how I've check ed news.

And then lastly, the protest reached the more casual core of people who may have not even known about the protest before hand or understood the extent of it, and they are angry that this thing that didn't affect them took away all their content.

To be honest, 2023 has feel relatively calmer than the past few, I guess covid being that all encompassing to life. Of the things on your list I do think AI is probably the first thing that comes to mind when I think of what we are "on the brink of". This leap that happened the past couple years in LLM was shocking enough, wondering what the next couple are going to look like.

Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it's an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don't blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.

For reasons no one can fathom

The ROM hacking community takes this personally.

ROM hacking and well, just retro development like this is awesome. I think there is something to be said about the creativity that comes with a limited canvas and so on

Ostensibly they don't wish to scale at the expense of the quality of their community.

A part of me believes they will give some bs reason to keep their "scab" mods immune, but I would love if they didn't and the chaos that would ensue.

There is traction, and in fact already a fix in review.

Certainly so. From a sort of... sociological point I'm wondering what the impacts are of major instances growing independent of each other. I feel like I can already feel it with kbin and lemmy both growing separately during the blackout. I'm wondering if the trend for major instances is going to be where each one has their own unique culture or if they will eventually homogenize.

Only real concern here, although I didn't participate during the mastodon surge last year, I heard that defederation became a bit of an issue with how common there. Granted, I feel like the impact is probably less here with the fact that you are interacting with topics rather than people.

Yup, exactly. Welcome to the fediverse!

Ah interesting. I actually see this post over there so it seems replies from kbin are actually federating now. The question is if I will see my own comment.

Edit: I do! Great news

Ironically, still some issues with the federation, so we can see them but they can't see us. We're in the walls.

Ernest might have also gotten up more servers to handle the load, noticing that cloudflare is off and we are federating again (this is a beehaw thread)

The best freedom was realizing the armor wasn't doing that much to help me and it was just more fun to figure out the silliest outfit to kill bosses in.

This past few months I've gotten into Trackmania. It really is the perfect "settle down for the evening and play with a video on the other monitor". I can just grind out records, while only needing two fingers max on my keyboard, and just enough attention.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/83

Popped an issue in the issue tracker for it. I think it should be default to be hidden, especially with the fact that most people coming from reddit would expect the same.