azura

That's a community/mindset issue, not a fediverse issue I think. It was useful because that's where the people went, so if the people went somewhere else, the niche communities would thrive there just the same I'd think.
Over the last 10 or so years this centralized mindset has really taken a big hold. Before sites like Reddit, Twitter, FB, etc. existed, the internet was basically all niche communities that all had their own space.
I think especially for niche communities the fediverse could be a fantastic opportunity.

Especially because I'm sure there's a lot more that goes into this that we don't see. Like you gotta have backup strategies for when something unexpected happens. You have to somehow be able to recover from that and you can't just always reload a save. That same runner also has a whole lot of blindfolded super Mario 64 runs some of which were also at gdq and it is amazing to watch. I highly recommend.

I don't know how much of a good fit it might be but maybe Divinity original sin 2?

Am now looking up weird speedrunning challenges like this. It's fantastic

I am entirely inspired. I want to do this. Probably don't want to jump in the deep end here but I'm hunting for communities.

it warms my heart to see so many people slowly figuring this out. This is what the internet was meant to be all along.

Just save your instance as "reddit"/"apollo"/whatever on your phone. This is the trick they wish you didn't know.

Don't forget us kbin users too! We're all in the same boat now

sshhhh don't tell my boss I'm here

Defederation I believe is a really powerful tool. More so than it seems. It creates islands of a sort and you can be more or less assured that your interests are respected. If they're not you move to an instance that federates with likeminded individuals. Makes it so much easier to isolate bad actors since they tend to group together. And then you disconnect from them and suddenly a whole avalanche of problems simply goes away. Moderation is obviously necessary but it is much more of a community effort. Keep in mind that most admins and mods are here because they want to use the forum just like you do. Your interests align much more than if a vc backed company Hosts your community with the singular goal of extracting as much value out of you as they can in whatever way available.

Someone posted a link a while ago to an article called killing community. I believe it speaks what I've been thinking for a while. I've quit so many social media over such a long time but I'm also part of a small community of friends. We Have our own little corner of the internet with file sharing and things like password manager and chat server and so on. We've been going strong for 15 years and going. Growth at all costs destroys communities.

I believe it just felt more pseudo anonymous because of how lively discussions can get, but nothing stops you from going back through peoples accounts and getting a feel for them. If you'd like to post something completely anonymously here you arguably have even more choice since you could set up accounts on entirely different instances with an entirely new name and nobody would know who you are. So I think it's a mentality problem and not exactly a technical thing. You can be anonymous here too. :)