I believe it’s a Star Trek instance and a smaller instance that’s called lemmy.one or something like that.

Good to see another instance defederate from ML. Now if only more of the non-tankie communities moved off ML (it’s slowly happening).

What’s are you on about? There is no centralised censorship. Every instance can make their own decision around whether they want to federate with ML.

The weird discount application and the sales taxes.

The sales tax always drove me nuts (and in total I loved in North America for a decade), I could never get it over it.

Where I live we just get an item list (with true cost per item) and a subtotal.

That’s a fucking wild bill if you are not from the US. One would almost think you are being scammed (I am talking about the deceptive structure of the bill, not the values).

I tried the demo (this was over a year ago, so much could have changed). Seemed solid, but a little bit average. The world was compelling and I was curious to learn more. Some unique mechanics were included.

In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.

I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.

I think the bigger deal is Lemmy/Threadiverse getting 100K MAU and seeing steady growth beyond that. We are currently at around ~50-55K MAU.

Subs are a deceptive metric, MAUs are far more important.