Yeah I could see this being a big factor. Advertising money can also mean directly paying people to use it, and hoping some of their followers might come along.

Fixed the community link for you: !Randomactsofgaming@lemm.ee

Unfortunately I feel like people have stopped looking for a Twitter alternative already

You could say the same thing about why they made Bluesky when Mastodon exists

Yea the Mastodon devs are seriously underestimating how lazy the average person is lol

I think it’s just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn’t really a great show of what ActivityPub can do. They intentionally don’t have an “algorithm” or any kind of content discoverability. Also the federation is limited to following users, on Lemmy you can follow topics and that causes all their posts and comments to federate.

Just today I heard Bluesky is making a Reddit alternative. I’m a bit worried they overtake Lemmy.

there’s an open issue filed for this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4619

I scrolled to the bottom, saw there was 1 instance still running 0.16.6 lol, I clicked on it and saw it’s actually still active, there are recent posts there. Amazing.

Edit: all from 1 user lol no upvotes, might even be a bot.