Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?

The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.

If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.

I agree

We can only hope that there are people waiting in the wings at Valve who are ready to take over the reins whenever Gaben is done and carry the torch forward in the same direction.

Valve is a private company. Microsoft can’t just buy Valve, Valve would have to agree to that. Considering Valve has (for a company their size) effectively unlimited resources already, and considering that Valve’s founder and leader is a known detractor of Microsoft, this is a nothing story. Microsoft will not buy Valve. This is baseless musing, like how I sometimes daydream with my wife about what we’d do if we won the lottery (which we don’t play).

Of course Microsoft would love to buy Valve. Just like they would love to buy Nintendo. I’d like to buy a Lamborghini. All these things are about equivalently likely, zero likely.

One thing I don’t like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn’t subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

If I’m going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That’s hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

I think it’d make sense to offer a refreshed device that is either smaller, has better cooling, or both. And maybe an upper tier device with a better screen.

Which is so silly because it should be relatively obvious that people use keep for more than Tasks. But this is Google we’re talking about so nothing should surprise me.

Don’t be silly, you also need some chewing gum and bits of string.

You’re right, they don’t need to make games. Yet they just released Alyx! Counterstrike 2 is known to be in development!

I don’t play TF2, so I don’t know what they’re doing right, but people are still playing it so whatever they are doing is apparently just fine with a lot of players. Bots have been problematic in online games forever, I don’t really know if that’s a TF2 specific issue. In any case, they’ve already supported TF2 way longer than most companies actively support their non-subscription games so I’m not sure what level of expectation is fair really.

No one has to like Valve, but painting them as this evil force in the gaming industry is a little bit silly IMO.

Valve? Profitable at all costs? The same Valve that refuses to give sequels to games for their own IPs because they can’t come up with ideas they feel are innovative enough, even though they know they would sell tens of millions of copies regardless of the quality?

The same Valve who literally gave Proton to the Linux gaming community?

That valve?

I don’t know why this keeps having to be said, but companies need to defend their IP in court or they risk losing their trademarks. This does not mean companies are evil.

As for not listening to TF2 players, I’m pretty sure the game is still pretty popular so they must be doing something right.

I’m not a valve apologist. I hate that they’ve shifted their focus from developing games to developing their platform for many years. It’s frustrating. But they did just release Alyx. And they are objectively doing some great things for the PC gaming community with the steam deck.

Lemmy needs both content generators and content consumers. Not everyone needs to do both if that isn’t what motivates them to come to the site.

I don’t really love comparing to reddit because what reddit became isn’t what I hope for lemmy, but to make the point… What percentage of people do you think made content on reddit? I’d guess it was a fraction of a single percent.