Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?

I mean partially, yeah. I dunno.

I think in total I kinda just don’t see the migration, for these things, as a big issue. Any sort of, more crystalized or important knowledge, is usually saved on some ancient forum somewhere, or a book, or the internet archive, something to that effect, so realistically we’re not losing a whole lot with every migration, except for the kind of, ambient fomo and depression that people tend to have whenever they experience the death of anything, even a kind of shitty internet platform. The death of possibility that it represents.

I mean it’s maybe kind of annoying, right, to see this happen repetitively, and for it to be the case that we can never have any “real progress” with any of these applications, right. Everything has to be conceived of as a totally new and independent thing, and nobody can every build on anyone else’s work. At the same time, people naturally leap to whatever the next best thing is when these services evaporate, so we usually don’t end up losing all that much in terms of technological progression. I’m also not too sure that you can really improve on Discord that much. It already has all your different chatting and video streaming needs, there’s not much more you could do without just kinda, turning it into a totally different kind of thing.

I think maybe a more pressing issue, or annoyance, for me, is those actual monopolies which crop up. Shit like youtube, that’s probably a bigger problem. They have the total power of a video sharing platform, if anything gets erased from there, it’s probably just straight gone, because everyone kind of assumes that the servers are just going to remain free and freely accessible forever. I guess you could always just save your videos, though, but maybe that presents some kind of unsung cost of like, ease of accessibility, right. There’s not a great way to sift through all of the millions of hours of video content uploaded every second anyways, so I don’t know if it ends up mattering much, most of the time.

In sum I also think it’s kind of, misguided to blame the consumer for these sorts of behaviors. They’re that way because they’ve been propagandized too, because their friends all migrate and they are powerless to stop it, etc. The real things at work here are just like, the arbitrary forces of venture capital and the market, and the market regulation that surrounds all of this.