To be fair it's not really "falling" - Lemmy instances are not in competition with one another due to federation.
Understandably people want to feel like they "won" somehow, but this isn't something you really need to worry about on the Fediverse, it's more like everyone working alongside each other.
There is verification of sorts for what it's worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.
It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond "this is a famous person", since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.
I'm also a big fan of GrapheneOS which I've been using for over a year with not many issues. It feels nice to have a system with no bloat and decoupled from Google. Between F-Droid and the Aurora Store, I still haven't installed Google Play Services or any other dependencies as I've never needed them.
There's a couple of issues, but in the end they didn't affect me too much:
You can install Google Play Services however and have them sandboxed to work with specific applications, but I decided to just not bother.
If you're curious, banking applications work fine on GrapheneOS, although perhaps it doesn't work for all of them, but I have had no issues.
Debian 12 with KDE Plasma, works perfectly on every system I have thrown at it.
It's weird right? After the 48 hour blackout, the community was just filled with "well, that was completely pointless, I missed my content!", when you think they'd understand the issues considering what's happened with RuneLite in the past.
Your comment doesn't really contradict anything I said, and I agree with you.
I don't subscribe to the idea that the Fediverse means everyone should have to interact with everyone, to be clear, but people absolutely have the choice to federate with those we may consider bad actors, and then we can respond in kind.
I am all for defederation of bad actors, I'm mostly just explaining why others are not against the defederation of Threads.
True, the claim that people "absolutely trust corporations" is definitely hyperbole, but I would say they most certainly have some implicit trust for them in a way that people might not trust a volunteer.
Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.
It's the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don't have a presence there.
For a non-tech answer, it's basically the "language" used between these websites to make them talk to each other.
If a website uses ActivityPub, it can fetch information (and send information) to other sites that are using ActivityPub in a specific way that's designed for social media.
Another example of this would be SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) which is what e-mail uses so that different e-mail servers (outlook, yahoo, gmail, etc) can all talk to each other seamlessly.
They are actually, communities are ActivityPub groups, the issue is that Mastodon does not implement groups (but it is soon!), so what the Lemmy group has to do is boost all the posts/comments so that people can see them in Mastodon.
Once Mastodon gets groups though, the experience should be much better.
Haha, this is how fast-moving open source projects work, things change constantly as they believe it's better to just get (perceived) improvements out of the door when they're cooked up, instead of waiting in any capacity.
"Active users" in these sort of metrics tend to just be one sort of post/comment in the past 30 days, so probably!