I heard lemm.ee wasn’t vulnerable, so logging users out shouldn’t be necessary. To be vulnerable there would need to be custom emotes defined on the local instance by the admins, so I’m guessing they had none.

I don’t think there’s much keeping users outside that demographic away, more so that the fediverse is a tech solution to the reddit problem, so naturally the people that flock to lemmy are the type of person that looks for tech solutions to the problems they experience in daily life.

My mother just had her illegal IPTV streaming box stop working recently, was her solution to find an alternative? No, she simply stopped watching her shows and did other things instead, and complained about it. And that’s with full denial of service, not just limited/compromised service like reddit users currently experience.

It wasn’t until her tech-savvy nerd son set up another IPTV box for her that she was able to resume consuming the content she wanted to, and similarly lemmy won’t really take off until it reaches a critical mass where enough tech-savvy nerds have shown regular people Lemmy as the tech solution to the problem they’re facing. What’s holding up progress with that at the moment is that the reddit problem for most people isn’t significant enough for a regular person to be in a position to do anything about it, even if they are directly inconvenienced.

I see it in a similar way to how having multiple 3rd-party reddit apps is valid.

If you want to develop a 3rd-party reddit app, the aggregation and structure of the way content is delivered is already determined by reddit. In principle the task is to build a GUI around that.

Fediverse content could be threadiverse-style, or microblogging-style, or both. So to develop an app for this, first you’d need to figure out those aggregation and structure prerequisites. Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon are like different apps for fediverse content which each take a different approach to this. But since it’s FOSS, there is no 1st / 3rd party, they’re all made by one collaborative project.

If I’m not wrong, generally those that prefer threadiverse style will likely end up migrating to Lemmy or Kbin organically, users that prefer microblogging to Kbin or Mastodon, and users that engage in both might use Kbin for a unified presentation. Or, they might prefer discrete presentations which each specialise in the content type, and use both Lemmy and Mastodon. I understand this is a very loose set of overlapping parameters, but the clarity of purpose here is determined by the individual user’s chosen method(s) of interaction with fediverse content. This is definitely a more abstract notion for a user to think about than simply preferring a given visual style like with a reddit app.

Wherever users lie on the spectrum of use cases might not be clear enough to make generalisations like “lemmy is better than kbin for reddit users” accurately, but I think it’s clear to the users individually either a) the type of things they want to post/see or b) the existing forums e.g. reddit, twitter that they want to replace. So while it’s a more individual purpose, I don’t think it’s lacking in clarity to those individuals.

The culture that exists within the communities that use these pieces of software isn’t determined by the software, it’s determined by the instances and the users. But the different approaches to aggregation/structure might lend themselves better to certain kinds of community in a similarly organic way, which would also contribute to shaping which users are on which platform.

Really it’s just drama caused by the platform not maturing yet. Beehaw’s reasons behind defederating from large instances like lemmy.world are valid, but it’s not like other instances made them do it. It’s a choice they made to be able to create the space they want in lieu of proper mod tools. Hope they realise it won’t be an overnight fix, and the longer they stick to their guns the greater the risk of their communities fizzling out, which would be a shame as I agree they are some of the best.