It's fun for the first few months. Catch up on games movies etc. Gets boring after a few months, most people need goals in life and find it hard to set them for themselves...
It won't amount to much if there's no viable alternative.
Moving to piped, invidious, freetube etc is what most with big enough outrage are doing (including me) but let's face it: that's just kicking the can a bit further down the road. Can't "FOSS" YouTube, what they're rendering usable again still is fully owned by Google and they'll look in to deploying techniques to put an end to that Foss frontending too, eventually.
"If it's not allowed in the play store and we need to click away a Google warning or 2, maybe it's dangerous and we shouldn't use it" - average Joe. Next step: "... suspect was using signal, so we decided to ..." yada yada yada same as it already is perceived in general for tor and even with VPN in some countries. Just the fact you're not using the thing most other people use makes you stand out.
Letting YouTube and reddit and Shitter and co do their thing while making sure all the great advice on how to avoid them is easily accesible on Lemmy..
Same with lemmy. Who cares about us? Seems to be working somewhat tho.
Issue with videohosting is filesizes, bandwiths, and the gigantic archive.
That's why I said surprising competition: no, it wouldn't be from a big typical tech company.
I think you're wrong on the value of the demographic: there are definitely ways, sectors etc where a small group of relatively tech savvy, ad-hating, very critical, neckbearded, moob carrying people is more valuable than a large mob of typical yay-saying consumers. I'ld even say it's the kind of niche demographic that made reddit big in the first place.
All the generally established capitalist wiggleroom like minimum wages, paid holiday, affordable health care, education instead of manual labour for children etc were established by massive strikes and (threats of) violent masses.
Both sides are in a codependent downwards spiral towards more authoritarian states. No, nothing good ever comes from revenge after revenge after revenge.
The reddit crash in userbase and content quality actually began earlier indeed, with the wsb explosion into big media and the gamestock madness and the influx of a large flock of dumb people hoping to get rich quick.
I think a lot of the quality did move away from there to here. Lemmy should grow, but not too much or too fast. There's no rush, there aren't lemmy investors waiting for their double digit ROI by the end of the month.
In the olden days, it would have been the church and the local nobles calling the shots on the local community forum, staging a witch-hunt or a public hanging event to keep the topics within desired boundaries and squeezing money, engagement and thus community power towards certain projects and not others.
I agree with the idea of your post commenting on today's situation in capitalism, but disagree with the imo romanticised idea of how a community forum in the past would have functioned more independent and self-organising
Which makes it important to bomb old accounts' content. Adding "reddit" to a search term often lead to better results from search engines. It's better it shouldn't anymore.
It's not a base human condition. Things like buying a hawaii holiday on credit or advertisements for gambling in sports competitions are just evil ways in which people with large capital and brains squeeze out poorer and lower educated people, and shouldn't be allowed at all. It is not even an anti-capitalist stance, a capitalist economy can thrive just fine without that kind of misleading. A prime task of a government is to protect people from eachother.
It's fun for the first few months. Catch up on games movies etc. Gets boring after a few months, most people need goals in life and find it hard to set them for themselves...