I tried using Lemmy, but it’s unusable. Every thread has <5 comments. It’s a ghost town.

I’ve seen this type of comment multiple times on reddit and I still don’t understand this sentiment. It just shows that the OP has not once sorted by active and “nobody is using it so I’m not using it” is a pretty weak argument if you claim to “really like the idea”.

So, the main blocking problem for transitioning to the Threadiverse is that there are too many alternatives?

I know that the Rust project doesn’t often make things “official”, but in this case this would be a very easy way to solve a very real problem.

1. Hold a vote, which server we use. Within all the community, with everyone who has push access on GitHub, within the Leadership Council, on URLO, whatever. It doesn’t matter that much and, honestly, it’s bikeshedding.
2. Advertise it on the website and TWIR, and make the mods part of the Rust Moderation hierarchy.

Later, when we have some way to collect communities together, we can diversify again to have a bit more resiliency against one server going down.

I know the Leadership Council is probably busy, but I would really love if they would do this (though I’m not very deep in the Rust Project myself, so I can’t kick this off).

“I don’t like this centrally managed, corporate controlled social network. I’m going to move to this other centrally managed, corporate controlled network. It’ll be different this time.”

At some point, we have to stop blaming Reddit/Facebook/Google/etc and start accepting that some people really don’t learn from past experience.

Lemmy sucks in a lot of ways, but it’s something we control and can improve according to our needs rather than the profits of some amoral megacorp. I’ll take that over yet another round of surprised Pikachu in a few years.