personal guess is that they're trying to continue to tempt people over to the official app. given that rif has a lot of power users, they're probably hoping that they'll give in when they want to interact with content
or idk could just be a total bug
he did mention working on an app for Tildes, so a Lemmy version is possible. probably a bit of a harder port bc of the defederated nature
how is this process initiated? spez is using democracy as a buzzword. if these votes are user-initiated, it's just going to become a method of hostile takeovers. if they're admin-initiated, they're obviously going to be used mostly in retaliation. if spez has a workable solution to both, he should say it, instead of throwing out buzzwords like reddit has done with free speech for its entire history
a lot of people have already basically made this point, but ad revenue isn't really good enough to make massive massive tech platforms profitable, and there's only so much VC money they can all burn. we saw the first stage a few months ago when basically every major tech company had massive layoffs, now all these companies are trying to become profitable all at once
imo it's one of those tough situations that comes with the mix of federated instances and this style of forums. Mastodon had similar issues back in the day, with some instances defederating from .social, but usually not quite as high profile as this, and most users felt less of an effect. for me, Beehaw's more walled garden lead me to choose another instance, and I pretty quickly decided to create a couple accounts on different instances to prepare for these issues
more than anything, l hope moderation tools improve to the extent that these issues can be avoided more
for me, it's far more about it being recurring than paying itself. I pay for software and media all the time. I just don't like having to pay over and over when i'm likely only occasionally using these services
right now, it's a little hard to say. it depends a lot on increased activity in my interests