No, it's 100% economics. Why do you think that having "careers, lives and travel" (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn't impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.

1. The sign-up process can be improved. But the reason people think choosing an instance complicated is because they're so used to having choices taken from them by social media companies, so when they're given the choice back, learned helplessness causes them to freeze.
2. You do bullet points with a dash or an asterisk, like - This is a bullet point or * This is a bullet point.
3. Click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen and click on "Settings". There is a section named something like "Default Homepage Sort". You can change it to view the All feed instead of Local.
4. We don't think having dumb people in the Fediverse is enshittification. Many of the current users would be considered dumb depending on who you ask. Corporate control of the Fediverse and companies milking users for money while making the user experience worse is enshittification.
5. This text formatting system is called Markdown, which is what Old Reddit used to format text before New Reddit introduced the graphic text editor. This page has a guide on all the formatting tricks you can do with Markdown.

That's more of an Instagram thing. The calling card of the teenage zoomer on Reddit is the nerd emoji and the moai head emoji.

There should be a patch for it that hides the "recommended" feed in the homepage. I'm not certain because I never use Youtube with an account or the official website/app, so I don't get targeted recommendations.

"Discussions became binary". And yet you subscribe to the binary of "hateful vs. non-hateful opinion" as if it's clearly identifiable.

This one is probably either small enough to fly under Disney's radar or has already been shut down. Disney successfully copyrighted one Club Penguin revival project for using the art assets and logo, even though the code was completely rewritten. Maybe this is the one?

I think it has to do with the higher rate of investor funding in the US that allows companies to spend above their actual assets by a huge margin, because of the significantly lower capital gains taxes there. The risk is much higher that US companies go bankrupt or investors stop funding the company during times of high interest rates (such as now), which is why US tech companies are disproportionately affected by the post-Coronavirus layoffs. Even Reddit itself (according to Spez) has not been profitable through all 18 years of its operation, but someone was clearly pouring money into it to keep it running. European companies on the other hand have a lot more administrative overhead when it comes to loans and investment than US companies, so they can't use money they don't have to offer attractive compensation on the level of US companies.

Oof, it sounds like your country is further along than mine on the "broken down social system" scale. My country is already dealing with reports about retirees who can't survive off their pension despite working for an average income their entire lives, old people who are not able to find caretakers and people who have to wait in line for an unreasonably long time to get public healthcare and subsidized housing. All while politicians slash budgets and make privatized systems the only way to get timely and high-quality services. I can only see it getting worse from here and it makes no sense to pay so much for something whose quality only gets worse with every passing year.

Nope, sorry. Just a memory of a Reddit thread with very out-of-context comments. Ironically, while trying to search for documentation of the thread, DuckDuckGo returned a lot of research papers about the analysis of bot content on Reddit starting from 2015, so there's still proof that botting on Reddit goes way back.

I just look to the microblogging side of the network (which has about 10 million total users) as a case study.

The ideal situation? More nodes are added to the network to spread the load and control away from a few very large and very expensive instances. The realistic situation? Some instances manage to secure external funding (such as mastodon.social) and grow extremely large at the expense of smaller instances that shut down from a lack of users and funding. Decentralized protocols like the fediverse and email are not immune to centralization thanks to lazy users who join the biggest instance. My pessimistic outlook is that the Fediverse will eventually become like email, with a few very big instances and a lot of spam making it difficult for smaller instances to enter the network. Enjoy the fresh new internet feeling while it lasts and move on when the platform starts to decay.

Seeing the community get destroyed is hard, but seeing the whole company the community relies on being taken over by someone who doesn't care about is okay?! These unpaid janitors seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities.

The barrier for entry for some subreddits is too high but to be fair, ChatGPT "funny responses" are low-quality content and should be removed.