It’s an interesting project, but NodeBB and Discourse have been working on adding activitypub support, so people who prefer bb style forums will probably use those. I don’t think they integrate that well with lemmy yet, but I think it’s being worked on.

Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn’t quite call it a myth. There’s a lot of materials that get lumped together as ‘plastic’, that each have to be handled differently.

Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren’t profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there’s a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There’s also mixed materials, where it’s hard to separate the plastic to recycle.

Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they’re handled locally so you know what’s recylable.

Matrix has spaces, which are collections of rooms.

There’s also XMPP. It’s not quite the same as discord, but it’s another federated chat protocol.

It’s not federated, but revolt.chat is probably the closest open source discord alternative.

Pixelfed has more than 100,000 active users, about 5 times what it was 6 months ago, so I wouldn’t really call it dead. And with the fediverse, pixelfed and mastodon can talk to each other, so even on less active platforms you can connect with millions of other people. Most of the accounts I follow on pixelfed are from mastodon.