It seems as if there is a bubble about to pop tbh. Along with twitter/reddit, it seems that even youtube is desperately trying to squeeze profit from a dried lemon by testing to see if users will stop using adblockers.
I think the dirty secret is that social media is both an incredibly vital part of people's lives and businesses, but it's free and ad revenue doesn't really make anyone the crazy profits their valuations suggest it should. That it's happening all at once is I think partly attributable to financial tightening -- higher interest rates mean people have less patience with money they've floated, partly that Twitter going weird gave everyone else cover to do the same, and my personal opinion, the Writer's Strike gives a little room for the companies to do dumb shit without having to worry about getting roasted on late night.
You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code...
Not sure what universe you are from but in my reality that's just bullshit. What you said is there but right next to the "set up a server" button is a "join a server button". And right above the scary code pictures is another "join a server button".
The theme options in the sidebar allow me to "enable top bar" but when I do, aside from the standard-seeming "All", "Subscribed" etc, this top bar lists a bunch of seemingly random mags. Is there a way to customize what's up there? Or at least set it to list my subscribed? as-is it's a bunch of mags I have no interest in
I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it's much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don't understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of "Favorite", "Reduce" and "Boost" are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since "Post" sounds more like a new thread than "Article" to a newcomer.
There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn't have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.
Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.
Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.
why do you doubt it? there are thousands of new people flooding in daily. set up the mags and post for engagement? sounds like a lot of work but I understand what you're missing, my communities are not here either, but I'm going to do my best to make a space for them.
Until search engines and LLM companies start crawling the fediverse, this will continue to be a niche of the internet, albeit perhaps large one at that.
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