That’s a community/mindset issue, not a fediverse issue I think. It was useful because that’s where the people went, so if the people went somewhere else, the niche communities would thrive there just the same I’d think.
Over the last 10 or so years this centralized mindset has really taken a big hold. Before sites like Reddit, Twitter, FB, etc. existed, the internet was basically all niche communities that all had their own space.
I think especially for niche communities the fediverse could be a fantastic opportunity.

I think there is a lot of usability work still to be done. You can only sign in to your instance with your credentials, not at any other. Other instances should preferably give you a button to view the post you’re currently looking at in your own instance. So click the button, type in the address of your instance, and it redirects you to your own instance with the post you were viewing already open. Right now you have to copy the address of the post you were viewing and paste it into your own instances search field, or get to the post in some other way on your own instance.
This is particularly problematic when a post links to another post using a full URL to the post. If you click that, you get moved to the original instance that this post is on, which may not be the instance you yourself are on.
This sounds more confusing than I believe it is. If you have an account on beehaw.org, you can only interact with other posts if you’re currently viewing that post on beehaw.org. If you’re not on beehaw.org, you have to find the post you want to interact with on beehaw.org first before you can interact with it.
I’m trying to come up with an analogy. Like… uh…
Imagine you’re borrowing a book from a library. This library also has the possibility of borrowing books from other libraries if they don’t have it. But once you’ve borrowed it, you can’t just go back to any library and hand in the book there. You have to hand it in to the library you yourself have borrowed it from, which can then send it back to the library they borrowed it from. You always have to go through your own local library because the other libraries might not know who you are.
Maybe that’s stretching it a bit. I’m definitely all ears for better analogies.

Especially because I’m sure there’s a lot more that goes into this that we don’t see. Like you gotta have backup strategies for when something unexpected happens. You have to somehow be able to recover from that and you can’t just always reload a save. That same runner also has a whole lot of blindfolded super Mario 64 runs some of which were also at gdq and it is amazing to watch. I highly recommend.

I don’t know how much of a good fit it might be but maybe Divinity original sin 2?

Am now looking up weird speedrunning challenges like this. It’s fantastic

And even relying on those free accessibility focused apps won’t help because I’m pretty sure they have a strategy in place for getting rid of those as well. So yeah.

I really do hope that’s the case. I’m a bit skeptical but I really do wish.

I am entirely inspired. I want to do this. Probably don’t want to jump in the deep end here but I’m hunting for communities.

A lot of mods were using 3rd party apps right? So maybe the quality degrades significantly enough.

they’ve basically already said they won’t. With communities only shutting down for a day or two, it really doesn’t create any incentive at all for Reddit to fix their ways. They’ll just wait it out, things will go back to how they were before, and nobody has achieved anything at all. Either we actually make it hurt by staying away, or we won’t and then they know it’s OK to do this kind of thing, and they’ll keep doing it because at worst people will just stay away for a day or two. Not a big deal.
And not even that. There are still an incredible amount of people active on there afaik. So I’ve given up at trying to convince people to stay. Let the people who want to leave leave. Our communities might just be better off for it. I’m definitely sticking around. Fuck Reddit.

it warms my heart to see so many people slowly figuring this out. This is what the internet was meant to be all along.

Just save your instance as “reddit”/“apollo”/whatever on your phone. This is the trick they wish you didn’t know.

Don’t forget us kbin users too! We’re all in the same boat now

sshhhh don’t tell my boss I’m here

This has to be one of the strangest rabbit holes I’ve ever gone down.

No matter what it is, if it can be put in a tea bag, it will be.

Defederation I believe is a really powerful tool. More so than it seems. It creates islands of a sort and you can be more or less assured that your interests are respected. If they’re not you move to an instance that federates with likeminded individuals. Makes it so much easier to isolate bad actors since they tend to group together. And then you disconnect from them and suddenly a whole avalanche of problems simply goes away. Moderation is obviously necessary but it is much more of a community effort. Keep in mind that most admins and mods are here because they want to use the forum just like you do. Your interests align much more than if a vc backed company Hosts your community with the singular goal of extracting as much value out of you as they can in whatever way available.

Someone posted a link a while ago to an article called killing community. I believe it speaks what I’ve been thinking for a while. I’ve quit so many social media over such a long time but I’m also part of a small community of friends. We Have our own little corner of the internet with file sharing and things like password manager and chat server and so on. We’ve been going strong for 15 years and going. Growth at all costs destroys communities.

I believe it just felt more pseudo anonymous because of how lively discussions can get, but nothing stops you from going back through peoples accounts and getting a feel for them. If you’d like to post something completely anonymously here you arguably have even more choice since you could set up accounts on entirely different instances with an entirely new name and nobody would know who you are. So I think it’s a mentality problem and not exactly a technical thing. You can be anonymous here too. :)

I don’t think I will ever forget my icq number