Yep. It’s been on the radar for a while, the film didn’t pull it out of nowhere. Though I think back in the day it was always thought of as a fairly unlikely scenario. But that was some 20 years ago. A lot has sadly not changed at all since then.

The lack of pushback was because lemmy hadn’t really formed its own discrete culture and community. There just weren’t enough people for that to happen. Lemmygrad is probably the only exception, as they formed a community and have been around for a while. And yea, they’re looking at the rest of lemmy as a kind of Reddit hellacape now. Literally they post memes about people just shutting all over the place. And, they’re not entirely wrong, as you hint at.

It’s a little bit of a shame. As arguably it was necessary. But also, it’s arguably been too rushed. Building up communities and spaces is probably best down more slowly and organically. Lemmy probably went through two steps of growth in one short period. Mastodon by comparison had already had migration events prior to 2022 that had built up site-culture, though that has been somewhat overrun by some Twitter culture, but I think a cultural fusion is happening. Many parts of lemmy however are now basically subsets of Reddit culture. Not bad but not great.

Interestingly, the dynamics between tech and culture are manifesting, where the tech and and interface differences between Reddit and Lemmy (eg no karma) are forcing cultural changes, as is the federation aspect.

“Oh no … my very new free software that’s not selling my data and run by VC overlords has some bugs”

I know I’m being an asshole there, but this is about more than usability, it’s about values and speaking with your feet. Not that your comments about usability and bugs don’t matter … they do! My issue is that it is way too normal to put convenience and usability front, center and above everything else.

So many conversations with intelligent people about things like this end with “but is it as convenient!?” If that’s all we care about, then we don’t really deserve anything better. In the mean time, we can try to adjust what we and others care about.

Well tumblr are supposed to come to the fediverse at some point. And they reportedly were receiving people from the Twitter migration.

Yea I think there’s a healthy perspective here. Many want Twitter and Reddit to die completely. Realistically, that won’t happen, not soon anyway. What’s happening now is more of a fracturing where different people can be happy in different places in the same way that there was a time when everyone was either on Twitter or Facebook and that time passed too.