Free Open-Source Artificial Intelligence

Yeah, I agree. And I appreciate your perspective.

I don't think growing Lemmy and funnelling in users works out. We don't grow. We're somewhere between 40k and 50k active users and there is no trend in either direction.

Last year, I despised beehaw for doing their own thing and not respecting how federation is supposed to work. That is connecting people and not being a patchwork of small spaces that don't talk to each other because of small minds/perspectives... I think I changed my mind a bit. Their way of doing things turned out to foster better behaviour than on other instances. It's still detrimental to the idea of a federated platform, but still... The effects aren't just negative.

I think we have lots of issues here. The culture is a bit different from what I'd like it to be. It's a tiny bit above Reddit in atmosphere, but on the downside it lacks the (niche) experts. It's more average people here and just the most predominant opinions. Furthermore, it's too much discussing the news and not much else that'd be meaningful for my life. It's too small for lots of things that this place could excel in and that you won't find anywhere else.

And the technology really isn't that good. Progress is super slow, they don't implement the things the users need and wish for. And it doesn't foster growth or nice behaviour.

And I think that's the main issue. We'd need a solid basis to build something upon. It needs to be shiny, have excellent moderation tools and user-facing features. All of this has been requested but except for things like instance blocking by the user, that doesn't even block their users, we didn't get much.

My personal wish is that new approaches like PieFed will go ahead and provide that to us. I think I'd like to host an instance with that and then invite some people. As of now I didn't advertise for Lemmy because I think neither the software, nor the atmosphere/community, nor the content here is worth convincing anyone to join. At this point I'm just waiting for one of the three to get anywhere. But I think I'd also like to defederate from a few people. And force them to be nice, upvote replies, not just dump any random links but provide some text in a post, and have some niche interest communities, because just dumping links to news and posting memes isn't cutting it. We already have X and Mastodon for that...

And a little disclaimer: I'm being negative in this comment. But that's not all there is to it. There is a reason why I'm here. I regularly have nice interactions, learn new things and have good conversations. It's just that it's far between and I see lots of potential for more. And I'd really like that to become reality.