Lost and Battlestar Galactica aired approximately in parallel. Being a sci-fi fan, I watched BSG, of course, but many friends watched Lost. It definitely had more mainstream appeal and a higher profile. But from the sounds of things, it really lived up to its name! I’ve always been glad I got into BSG, even if it also went off course for a while.

IIRC BSG got screwed in part by the Hollywood writers’ strike. Did that impact Lost as well?

I’m not sure that’s the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don’t think it really even registers as an option for most of them.

The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That’s fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there’s an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.

I’m sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can’t save them all, but I’d love to get more people off of those sites.

Not great, IMO.

Lemmy seems to have stabilized, if not stagnated. There are a few active political and tech communities, but they’re not particularly diverse in their viewpoints. Most of the other communities I used to follow on Reddit (local/regional discussion, US sports, cycling, etc) never really reached critical mass here and are basically ghost towns.

Mastodon is similar. I’ve observed a number of moderately high profile accounts move back to X/Twitter in recent weeks/months. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017 or so. I think 2023 or 2024 were probably the high-water mark for activity. Things may look different from other perspectives.

I’m still here, and have no intention of going back to X/Twitter or Reddit any time soon, but the fediverse increasingly feels like usenet. Still inhabited by a few diehard lifers, but generally irrelevant to the broader population.

I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.

I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.

Very basically, what’s happening is that every file that is read (including the binaries and libraries that make up the services you run, etc) is loaded into memory and stays there until that memory needs to be reclaimed for something else. It’s a good thing. It means that the next time that file is needed, it can be accessed directly in RAM rather than reaching out to the filesystem.