Yeah I could see this being a big factor. Advertising money can also mean directly paying people to use it, and hoping some of their followers might come along.
I think it's just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn't really a great show of what ActivityPub can do. They intentionally don't have an "algorithm" or any kind of content discoverability. Also the federation is limited to following users, on Lemmy you can follow topics and that causes all their posts and comments to federate.
Just today I heard Bluesky is making a Reddit alternative. I'm a bit worried they overtake Lemmy.
I don't understand your comment. This is a fix for a crash in the backend, I don't see how it relates to lemmy-ui because it seems like any frontend would cause a crash with this issue if it's hitting the same API route. Also 50 is a lot. Finding a post with 50 comments is rare, finding one with a chain of over 50 in a row is even more rare. Such a thread would be clunky to display in the main comment tree anyways.
This isn't just a comment with 50 replies, this is 50 levels of indentation.
It's also funny to criticize Lemmy for being biased towards its own frontend when it probably has more (active and working) frontends than any competitor (Reddit, Mbin)
because it affects the communities too, lots of outside accounts use the communities here
if there's downtime for the instance or database issues or something, then subscribers to c/programmer_humor or c/programming might want to know because it affects them too
Not tracked on Steam but Deus Ex (Randomizer mod), The 7th Guest (speedruns), and a few hundred hours in Overwatch