However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.
Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.
I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.
This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."
I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.
Not a link aggregator.
> Lemmy
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
