Always welcome! I share my thoughts freely to help! This is a fascinating set of questions, and I can't wait to see what people are sharing.
GeekyOnion
joined 1 year ago
"This place exists to deny it from others," or "no one else had this space, so we took it."
I also think an interesting question is about how they are formed. The flavor of a forced settlement (prisoner transport) versus an opportunistic settlement (rich resources) is going to influence a lot of the behavioral patterns of the people.
I tend to play a lot of the old text-tile games that I cut my teeth on back starting with Angband. Any of those variants are enjoyable, but I pretty much stick to Zangband (Angband adding in the work of Zelazny) and frogcomposband (It's a mouthfull, but FUN).
It's kind of the defining line between "community as a product" and "community as a platform." What is offered and provided is a platform for all of us to work together to build and sustain a community. What we're used to is the other type, where there has always been a drive to monetize the experience. It's like the fallacy that content creators owe their audience anything other than the content they've already provided. The people here running and moderating the community have my respect and admiration, because it's not something I'd willingly step into, knowing the unrealistic expectations of most Internet participants.
I'm currently working on a miter saw table, and getting prepped to install/level the casters! 
I have my Mastodon instance broken out into docker containers running on one of my "beefy" servers in my homelab. I don't regret setting it up at all, but I'm glad I've resisted lemmy/kbin/etc. With Mastodon, I don't feel any guilt about keeping it to myself, and having no anxiety about someone losing content. I tend to feel like if someone is creating content on a platform I own, I have an obligation to treat it with respect, as opposed to how I feel about my own content.
What I'm probably going to struggle the most with is getting half-way through a post or comment before thinking, "eh, no one's going to read this anyway," and then deleting it. People seem much more inclined to engage on the various Fediverse platforms than I'm used to.
This is some good news. I don’t have a deep or intelligent comment beyond, “nice.”
I think you hit on one of the key points. Every other time this same pattern has played out, each of those sites becomes a shadow of what they once were, but the continue because (to be blunt) running Internet sites is CHEAP.
Really, it's totally in the category "when you're getting something for free, you're not the audience, but rather the product."
When people failed to buy in very deeply to the tchotchkes to "pay" for Reddit, it was the last gasp of any effort other than wholesaling the dataset to advertisers and anyone willing to pay for the content.
My break from Reddit wasn't driven by any one single act, but rather the continued (and organized) sanitization of the Internet to appease conservative, Christian investors who make demands on the morality of the content of a site.
I bought the various flavors of Gameboy just to play the slew of those games.