I like the client-side interface and really appreciate the ability to follow users but Kbin seems to have some backend issues still. Remember that Kbin is at an extremely early stage of development and really wasn't ready for mass adoption (it's a couple of months old!)
Oh god the lingering germophobia as a result of the pandemic shining a massive spotlight on surface contamination and spread vectors has completely ruined me.
Lemmy.ml has c/Community_Requests and I think it's about time we had that on .world too.
My first thought was AstroTurf too but honestly Lemmy is still small enough that I wonder if Meta even cares enough for it to pay for astroturfing here. They got more signups in a couple of hours than Lemmy got users in three years, and by several magnitudes even. Plus it's an inherently hostile demographic for them. They're better off investing in positive posting on Reddit, which I'm sure is what they're already doing.
They'll kill it by having the largest userbase, and therefore the most and best content, and then finally defederating and forcing everyone to join Threads. At least that's what they'll most likely attempt to do. It remains to be seen whether they'll be successful. The EEE approach has been used before and is well documented. Read more on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
While you're not wrong per se, having a massive instance like .world has enabled some much needed stress testing of the Lemmy backend in a way that really hasn't been possible before, which will help the Devs find optimizations and improvements that will facilitate future growth overall on all instances. The recent memory leak that was discovered is a great example of it.
Really testing the limits of scalability is important for the overall future of Lemmy. Doing it on a server whose admin already runs a large mastodon server and has proven to be trustworthy and reliable is not a bad thing so long as donations can keep up with server costs.
Finally, gathering on .world makes it easy for Reddit refugees to transition, which is actually valuable in reaching critical mass on Lemmy, though maybe that first big wave of people has passed already.
While third party app users probably had a larger proportion of contributors, Reddit is big enough to still have plenty of content. Moderators are more interesting and it remains to be seen over time if an erosion of quality moderation happens which would make Reddit even shittier. Especially since Reddit seems to keep fumbling when it comes to providing good first party mod tools, see the whole r/Blind fiasco.
am I wrong in thinking that the users are the product and the advertisers the customer?
As long as profitability is the goal then you are correct.
I prefer just having each thing in its own place and wholly separate, to be honest. I did enjoy the no holes barred shitpost-a-thon once a year or whatever on r/Soccer over Christmas when the mods had a day off. That felt like a proper event, but I'd not want it more than once or maybe twice a year on the main sub.
I guess a consensus hasn't been firmly established on memes but I personally wouldn't mind restricting them on this sub, creating a separate Soccer Shitpost sub and linking that in the sidebar.
Oh man I remember the asscracks guy, that's gotta be like ten years ago now?
It's a bit of a shame the no-poop guy is no longer the top post on Lemmy.
That's correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
You're right. Going down through the levels of "okay, and why?" works on a theoretical level but requires both the person asking the right why-question and a level of intellectual honesty from both parties that is incredibly hard to find.
It's not a bad approach for questioning your own beliefs though, if you can muster the strength to be honest with yourself.