If it makes you feel better, I probably understand Lemmy less well than you, so if you're a misfit, so am I, lol. I see my role here as "someone to put words in the databases other people build."
And you could add that you probably wouldn't learn as much about them by looking at their phone for a few minutes than Threads transmits to Meta every second of every day.
I'm pretty sure the platform that kills Twitter will be Twitter. It's not going to be a question of a superior platform luring people away, Twitter is just going to become unusable because of the management. When that happens, replacements will compete with one another. I don't personally have an opinion on which is going to win the competition, but I think you make good points about important users vs features.
And since Lemmy is already at, iirc, the 200,000 mark, and is only part of the greater fediverse... I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't feel lonely here.
Welcome aboard! We have beans! Also, I saw a fellow lemming giving out Lemmy lemons, so those, too. (Someone from kbin is going to have to help me out with their team's memes...)
Paying for porn is a good way to get quality porn, IMO, because you support the people making what you like. But if you're not picky, I suppose it doesn't matter. Whatever floats your goat.
I expect them to move chat functionality to the official app. Facebook made a similar move many years ago, and I think they did get increased access to users' phones that way. Reddit might find it a harder sell, given that they have a totally different role in people's lives, and (much as I hate to imply anything nice about Facebook), a much less usable app.
This is a great point, and a great link. Reddit doesn't understand the extent to which "user goodwill" in general and "moderator goodwill" in particular were crucial to its business model. Without them, it's not going to make any difference what they do, profits will not, as Huffman put it, "arrive."
(Relatedly, what a revealing way to put it. Huffman obviously thought he was sitting on a heap of static assets he could tap into for quick profits instead of a dynamic system he could have cultivated for a rich harvest. Too late now for either, I expect, though he may catch the dregs if he's lucky).
I... think you might need to accept at least a late-August in order to bring in certain kinds of content. Some interest groups aren't here because the userbase is not yet wide enough to include them, so in order to get a broad range of non-tech content, a slice of "the masses" are going to need to come in. You absolutely can protect your own spaces from people you don't want there, though.
People don't have to be actually tech people now, they just have to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of the people on here are tech people, and a lot of the conversations assume a high level of technical expertise. I'm in that "I don't know what y'all are talking about, but I'm cool with it" crowd, and there are definitely communities where I would probably be okay even if I had a lower tech tolerance. I think we're relatively close to being able to invite non-tech people, though it will mean a bit of a culture shift in communities that are not explicitly tech-focused.
We were younger. There's no shame in being young, and liking things then that seem stupid now.