Which criminals though.

Wage thieves? Polluters? Tax evaders? Or just the poor ones?

If you're happy to pay whatever it costs to host then there's no other disadvantage to this.

The only thing I can think of is if you somehow end up at odds with an admin of a big instance and they defederate your instance. Or perhaps in the future major instances decide to only federate with instances of a certain size, for some as of now unpredictable reason

Just donate if you want to support your server.

Awards are special actions reserved for people who pay, that don't improve the platform anyway. It's enshittification.

Complain about things.

Unless it's something you can keep lighthearted, and maybe make a point with in a funny way. But just bitterly bitching about something in your life is probably the worst (normal) thing you can do. That or treat service staff badly.

On this subject, my personal definition for millennial is someone in the age bracket where they had to teach themselves how to use windows as a kid

Rotating gifs all over every homepage

No because I didn't choose this public forum for its privacy or security

Yes, that's how I know it has legs.

From usenet to reddit, the internet spaces that began by attracting a critical mass of internet/tech experts and enthusiasts are always the ones that end up going the distance.

You don't want to rush this place going mainstream, I promise. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Growth for growths sake.

Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.

For what? There's nothing to gain.

The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.

So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it

It feels like reddit from ten years ago, and has the critical mass to make it interesting to open and browse. I think it's a success.

I only use reddit now on revanced rif to visit a couple of communities that are too small to be worth replicating here yet

If threads scoops up all the people who turned twitter and reddit into celebrity gossip meme ghettos and keeps them in the shallow end of the pool then everybody wins

Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way

Sure, but it's still remarkable and it does change the tenor of the overall site.

At one point a couple of years ago I peeked at /all and I'm gonna say 85% of the top posts were from subreddits that were basically themed variations of "hey look at this asshole"

That shit definitely filters into the culture, and you see it in comment threads all the time where sometimes idea of a worthwhile contribution is just tagging iamverysmart or whatever

The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat