I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.

I suppose there’s an element of preference as well. If !myinterest@instance exists and is limping along with 80 subscribers and a post once a month, is that less discouraging? Maybe 300 subs and a post every other day is adequate? At the risk of scope creep, maybe the answer lies in more data and options to account for the preferences of those new to the Fediverse. I concede I don’t have answers though, and I’m obviously putting less work into it than you are.

Fight the good fight, friend. I need more posts about old TV shows and niche hobbies, so we just need more decent people, however they arrive. :-)

IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?

Sub : Community

• askreddit : asklemmy
• amitheasshole : asklemmy
• explainlikeimfive : asklemmy
• gaming : gaming
• pcmasterrace : gaming
• minecraft : gaming
• etc, etc.

You mean the thing for hosting galleries because Lemmy can’t do that yet and Imgur won’t work on Mobile without an app? Yes.

As a social network? No, and even when I tried it wouldn’t let me switch my post’s visibility from unlisted to public, so I shrugged and used it as an image host as I’d originally intended.