...we are unable to determine if there were guests onboard who were not attending.
If you can't determine this don't give a fucking bullhorn to a fucking psychopath whose message may be offensive to your paying fucking customers you fucking cretins!
By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.
Every once in a while I find myself looking at the Internet without ad blockers. Like, newly-installing a browser on a newly-installed OS, or trialing a new browser on my phone or whatnot. And when it happens it's a massive shock to me just how unusable the modern Internet is without an ad blocker.
If I were forced somehow to not use an ad blocker, I would probably stop using the WWW portion of the Internet and likely grossly cut down on other facets of the Internet.
Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.
I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical "gender" divisions that's in use in many languages isn't masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.
So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there's classifier words. (In English too: "a sheet of paper", not "a paper", but it's waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, "paper" (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with "spider" (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it's harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.
So I'm positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.
In many, many, many cuisines it is common to leave even the large spice elements in whole. Partially for the aesthetic and partially as proof of ingredients.
Dude couldn't tell the difference between plastic and tree bark!?
Mastodon is "dead" because you're not making the switch from spoon-fed algorithmically-supplied content to content you have to actively seek out. Mastodon supplies tools for this, but if these aren't for you, then yes, Mastodon is useless to you.
To make Mastodon "not dead" you have to take some actions of your own to become part, in effect, of an actual community. These steps helped me:
Follow some #hashtags of interest. As you find people posting interesting content on that hashtag, follow them. Engage with some of those directly, responding to their posts. Do this for a couple of weeks and you'll have a full feed.
Occasionally look into the local feed. Skip over stuff that bores you. Read stuff that interests you. If you see the same names making interesting content, follow them. Also, engage with the stuff that interests you by responding to posts.
Make content as well as the replies mentioned above. Apply relevant #hashtags so it's findable. But keep in mind that the system is not going to stuff this in other people's feeds on your behalf. This isn't Twitter or any other corporate microblogging setup. You need to get followers, which you can get by following steps 1 and 2. Otherwise you're just going to get the occasional person seeing your posts who is doing step 2.
Boost boost boost boost boost. There's no algorithm cramming posts into other people's feeds. The only way things go "viral" in Mastodon is if people spread it around. You have to be part of the process instead of abrogating that to an algorithm designed to foster "engagement" by spreading dissent and hate.
It's a "final straw" situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It's not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.
So they're not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They're quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into "go".
What you say: It's easy!
What you (hopefully) mean: Don't be intimidated! You can do it!
What they hear: You must be stupid if you can't do this.
What you say: It's so simple even a child can figure it out!
What you (hopefully) mean: Calm down and work through it. You've got this.
What they hear: Even a child is smarter than you!
Keep in mind that if you're dealing with someone who is struggling it is self-evidently not easy for them. Claiming that it is invalidates their experience and makes them feel small and stupid. Don't do that.
What you should say: I get it. This can be pretty intimidating. Let's work through this together.
It really is that simple.
I'm going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There's no persuasive argument I've heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
A non-technical end-user once had a problem with Windows. A technical friend said "SWITCH TO LINUX". Now they have thousands of problems.
I've been a non-stop user of Linux as my primary OS since before Ubuntu was a thing. I do not recommend Linux systems to my non-technical friends.
In 2001, when I left Canada, I had fond memories of Tim Horton's donuts and other confections. In 2016 when I went back for some paperwork and stayed a month I was absolutely shocked at just how crap Tim Horton's donuts had become: stale, lifeless, and oversugared/underflavoured. (I'd never liked the coffee so I didn't try it.)
Something big was lost in that decade and a half.
Fucking capitalists.