patatahooligan

It depends on what your bottleneck is. For example on my system I get

$ systemd-analyze                                                       
Startup finished in 11.976s (firmware) + 3.879s (loader) + 2.013s (kernel) + 157ms (initrd) + 6.354s (userspace) = 24.382s 
graphical.target reached after 6.316s in userspace.

The kernel boot process is only responsible for 2s of my boot time. So even if this does end up improving boot times, there's very little it can do. The real improvement for me would be to choose a faster-booting m/b. You can run systemd-analyze on your setup to see if the kernel boot time is more significant for you.

Full-time creators need to be paid, but it doesn't have to be for watchtime specifically. There are already services and creators on the web that make a living via patreon or other donation systems. And there are small-time creators or creators already backed up by funding that don't care about monetization.

I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:

• the sign up process
• the "local"/"all" distinction

So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:

• Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
• Filter by "all" by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don't understand what instances are and what "local" vs "all" means, then you are probably here for the "all" experience. If you understand and really want "local" you are probably fine having to set it yourself.

I have to image that most people with no intention of staying would not make accounts. Registered users are probably at least contemplating staying here for more than a couple of days. So the question for me is: will the communities here build a critical mass to sustain themselves after the blackout?

For me personally it's very simple. I will keep using Lemmy if there is enough activity to be worth it. I don't need it to be perfect or as active as Reddit or whatever. Just meaningful enough to warrant my time. I will keep my Reddit account for the time being, though.

Fair enough. I think it would be more accurate to say that you don't care about the benefits of federation, rather than there not being any.

But it while you feel fine with the "current process" clearly from an end-user perspective, it's worth considering how the process might harm you too indirectly. Some communities, especially niche ones, might not survive a migration. An enormous amount of information might eventually get lost if the old site dies or pivots to something that doesn't retain all the content.

And then there's all the things that can go wrong with giving all our data to a single entity. Maybe sometime in the future we find ourselves dependent on AI services and they go to shit. Now it's not obvious that we can keep migrating every decade because only a select few tech giants have the big data required to create competing services. And that sucks because we're the ones who generated it and gave it away.

Hopefully, the streamlining of the fediverse, which I agree needs to happen, will not be everyone signing on to the same instance, but rather the federation working great and the interfaces feeling so seamless that the average user feels like everything is in the same place without it really being so.

I really don’t understand the benefit of being federated

The benefit is to prevent this from being the next Reddit. Being a nonprofit doesn't really guarantee anything in the long term. OpenAI was a non profit and now it isn't... Rather than trust a single entity to not abuse its power, federation aims to not give any entity all the power to begin with.

It also solves practical problems. Which single benign entity would pay for the servers and internet connections to become the new reddit? I don't think there is one.