I made a Mastodon account during that blitz in '22. Yes, content wasn’t there yet, but honestly, it was the interface for me. It’s UI didn’t feel simplistic enough to me as someone just getting started with it.

Lemmy may have faced a similar fate for me if it weren’t for the smooth interface of Sync to be honest. I know many on here are leaps and bounds beyond my tech proficiency, but so many folks are still in the stone ages writing their passwords on post-it notes etc so to think that they’d adopt something like Mastodon over Twitter or Lemmy over Reddit seems like the bigger counterparts will always win just on sign-up flow and instant gratification.

My guess is it’s probably not extremists per se, but rather corporations that are scared of offending anyone and being the focus of the internet’s bad or uproar of the day. I will say though, at my last company, the younger generation was pushing all this stuff super hard. While I agree with plenty of the general purpose stuff, I’m like, can’t we just do our jobs and not sit in meetings all day about what our job is supposed to be?

I forget which Samsung galaxy model it was, maybe S6, but it had a universal IR blaster built into the phone which was super convenient for controlling all of my devices. I did however often abuse the shit out of it by flipping the channels on bar tvs or turning off the stereo receiver and nobody was ever suspecting it was me on my phone. I guess that’s probably why they removed it lol, but it was fun while it lasted.