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8 天前I can see some logic in this. Since X is the most populated service of its kind, it’s more democratic, meeting people where they already are. Around the end of last year I updated to a crash-prone build of Nightly and while I was able to eventually find a bugzilla ticket describing and reporting the crash, checking places like r/Firefox and searchable Nitter instances (I haven’t had a Twitter account in a decade and therefore can’t view most posts unless I log in) was my first response in diagnosing whether it was an issue only on my end or not.
Anyway, Mozilla lost me a long time ago as a believer of their institution. They just happen to benefit from Firefox being the most well-supported FOSS browser.
Doesn’t even need to be niche. There are no active major sports communities, much less local teams, which is about the only pleasure I get from browsing that place anymore through Redlib instances. Among others, BSky built cachet from sports journalists adopting the platform. Attracting a core of these otherwise apolitical mainstream interests may be necessary to kick start the network effect.
Aside, I would say it’s ironically the more peculiar cultures I’ve hung around that never had Reddit or Discord supplant their surviving forums and chat servers that are doing the best these days in consistent quality engagement. While I think the post and threaded comment format inherited from Digg is adequate for news and current events, I hope slower-paced subs seeking to migrate seriously consider if they’d be better served by a different kind of service too.