There are fewer people here, now, who just "hang out". I was just complaining about how lonely it can be on here, now. People used to post stuff and wait for a reply, so there was this long interchange and other people could join in.

But then Primal brought the trending list and all the influencers showed up, and now it's just one person saying something into a megaphone to his groupies, and then walking off the stage, leaving the groupies standing around, discussing how much they admire him. Or people don't look at threads. They just doomscroll the OPs. But OPs aren't discussions, unless they're air-replies over a small relay (which is cool 🤩, the Japanese do that).

And because the big relays are really spammy/gross, and the clients discourage active relay management, everyone just looks at their follows, now, so it's getting harder to meet new people or to simply stumble across an interesting conversation.

Communities and forums would change that, but everyone just builds Twitter 2.0, so most of the conversationalists have moved to other venues. I'm one of the last holdouts, but my frens mostly come here, to keep me company, and not because they wouldn't rather chat in SimpleX group, Discord, GitHub, or whatnot.