> New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically.
For technical discussions, this is a feature not a bug. Having a small technical hurdle to get over before contributing is a filter when it comes to having technical conversations that aren’t immediately shit up by low effort content.
The somethingawful forums are STILL around despite not being relevant in popular internet culture for almost 2 decades. Paying a one time $10 fee to post kept out people who weren’t really interested in contributing to the conversation.