I feel like one of the few cons of fediverse equivs to enshittified old sites is that they’re naturally going to primarily attract tech nerds who know how to run instances and etc, who usually are either abt 40 yrs old and largely disconnected from the backgrounds, cultural interests and reference pools, and sense of online comedy of the would-be-Reddit-ditchers half their age (not that it’s bad to be a 40yo who’s seen every beavis and butthead ep but only like five smiling friends screencaps, just that it feels I’d be babbling abt a dream I had immediately after waking up if I brought up any media made by someone born after 1992), or under 40 yrs old but only interested in posting on lemmy/mastodon abt tech nerd stuff (which is also fine! It just gets kinda boring when that’s the ONLY thing I see ppl post abt)

Regarding the Hexbeargrad sphere specifically it always trips me up when I’m not sorting by local and memes that feel like they’re frozen 2018 show up completely unthawed (although that’s less a 40yo techie issue and more one with Reddit fundamentalists having memories of Digg’s collapse), and though this place is obviously far more dynamic than lemworld and its brethren I still feel kinda left behind by some undefinable residual 2010sness in the air despite our relative advances (which I could’ve attributed to our discontinuity from the alternate path the sub would’ve taken if it dodged the banhammer if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re still at 1:1 parity with the commie subs still on reddit, so I might just be feeling an issue with reddit+its descendants as a whole idk)

Do note that the fact that we spent 1-2 years shitposting back and forth like a particle accelerator until we federated and got to unleash ourselves means that we were gonna be a few years ahead anyway against the other, more casual, 99.8% of the fediverse, bc normal ppl (unlike us) don’t have shitposting arms races against one another for fun every day (though we’ve kinda slowed down with that imo, step up ur gamessss)