First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.

However, I’m considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it’s even more cynical than reddit, and I’m losing interest in opening the app if it’s just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.

(Yes, I’m subbed to upliftingnews. That’s the 1%.)

Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?

That’s very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn’t allow any federation with them to stay safe.

There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can’t seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.