For sure and it's frustrating knowing every post I make anywhere is being used to train LLMs generally, but as you mentioned reddit was particularly egregious about it, picked a specific partner(s) for it, and focused on monetizing their users' content.

I assume anything you post, anywhere, thats not on a piece of notebook paper, is being used to train AI. They aren't learning much from me. Lol

Kind of. I don't think the Internet will ever return to the heyday of Reddit.

Once governments and groups recognized that social media actually does move public opinion, that was the end of good, anonymous social media.

The ways to bring some of that back aren't great. A community where everyone's verified is much better, but it'll be quite different from the Reddit days where you'd have (usually real) ridiculous subject matter experts chiming in on random threads.

You don't get that with a small, verified population. And when you don't have verification, well forever now have effectively psyops intending to influence you.

How is piefed going? It looks like a really great alternative.

that for people unhappy with the Lemmy software or developers

So piefed is the software where the anti-commie zionist nazi's are fleeing to to escape the evil communist devs of lemmy? Good to know!

I'd note that the same phenomenon exists on Reddit. You'd be surprised how many subreddits on a site much larger are maintained purely by the power of a few posters who feed the community with posts.

I'd also argue that television and movies on piefed.social, per activity, are much more active than what you suggest there.

If you really want a community to take off, you have to basically schedule yourself to make content there.

The lessons from every group I've grown (and haven't) is that consistency is key. You have to develop the habit in other people, and it might take a long time to start.

If you want to be a Twitch streamer, for instance, you have to do it at the same time every day.

There seems to be more discussion here if Linux, open source etc & not just the pointless questions that Google can answer. More conversations I enjoy reading responses and opinions. IDK I'm a noob & I like it here.

Block those communities if you don't want to see them. They won't be hurt because they won't know.

It failed because apparently the only people who left were right wing nuts so the only content they had was right wing shit. There's at least some Linux on lemmy...

I'm just bitter because I never get trunk from anyone, less yet myself.