I don't think that's the case they probably have had at least a small team working on this before the Steam deck was announced. I don't think the audiences overlap that much to be honest and the two devices have different use cases.

The steam deck is just a powerful hand held computer (relative to other gaming hardware is pretty weak though) that runs PC games with all the ups and downs that come with that. I think there are number of steam deck buyer that are not that familiar with the underlying hardware that are going to be disappointed when new games are not going to run acceptably on it. Where as for the switch/switch 2 games will at least run acceptably

Personally I would prefer if we didn't use "Lemmy" for everything. I really like programming.dev as a software development based instances. Also makes it less confusing if an instance decides to change to kbin or a future compatible server.

I just want a text only app for Lemmy/kbin. No thumbnails, profile pictures, in app preview of posts, or inline comment images.

I just want post titles, self posts text, and comments.

People think "oh it's like email, well I know Gmail is pretty good so I'll make an account there. Whatever decisions Google makes is by extension my decision

This is why I think email analogy is very useful to get the basics of how Lemmy/kbin work on a technical level but falls flat on a practical and social level

You have what I would call federation idealists that feel that is should be just like email you should be able to contact anyone. This ignores the fact that email is private communication tool vs a public facing forum.

The argument that instances should be utilities with no "politics" or "culture" just ignores the reality.

Intel marketing seems to be going all in on using generic names to trick people into buying lower end parts. They changed the marketing of Celeron/Pentium to the most generic "Intel processor" line up. Now when you specify to make sure you buy an "ultra" chip it's easy for the layman to buy the lowest end chip out of ignorance.

Unfortunately I don't know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.

I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.

My understanding is that as rates have gone way down the last couple of years and it wouldn't surprise me if Google just has less high quality ads and is dipping into the crappy cheaper ad buys to fill the space.

How do we handle "dupe" communities?

I think the only really option is to let things play out. This was/is a problem on Reddit see r/gaming vs r/games. Overtime certain communities on certain instances will float to the top.

What's the best way to find new communities?

This still needs some work. It would be nice if you were able to search communities by instance or look just see the hot/active page of a different instance to help with discoverablility. These may be possible but I haven't found how to.