Just a story. I'm always a little sad or nostalgic when I think about this.

I used to hang out at newschoolers.com. It was a North American skiing community. Every night it was busy, and Fridays/weekends especially busy. Discord type of busy, not reddit/lemmy. You could buy/sell equipment reliably. Teton Gravity Research was the unofficial sister site for old people and newschoolers was for park rats. It was thick in culture. People left because of Facebook, ads were introduced to finance servers, new unwanted and badly implemented features were added to attract/retain, the original user base graduated high school, got jobs, and stopped visiting. It was sad. Everyone could feel it dying but there's nothing you could do, communities are organic and they evolve and go extinct. I remember when an unpopular but industry connected member (eheath - he's still there! wow. I'm sure he's a good guy.) was made into a mod people were upset, and he proceeded to be a douche. Lots of things started to go bad, and eventually you just leave because it's not fun anymore. It was years before I started going to reddit, and I always hated it. Lemmy is better. There is a bit of a forum vibe, though I still have a lot of trouble recognizing names.

https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/2/Non-Ski-Gabber

• A feature that was always there and was great was the member list on the side - you could log in and see if your friends were online. Lemmy should think about doing that. We can see the mods, which is a reddit feature, but I'd rather see online members. You get to recognize people that way.