My personal opinion is that the results of the experiment are that Lemmy is not a good platform for community building. I’m glad we gave it a shot, but I probably won’t be using it anymore either way for a few reasons:

• The moderation just isn’t very good (we still have Nazi imagery and accounts on the server from the early spam wave with no way to purge them, though they are blocked and can’t post anymore but the images and what not are still being served as far as I can tell)
• The UI is generally confusing and hard to use, things aren’t logically grouped, etc.
• The federation capabilities don’t seem to actually be very good (I’m sure this will improve, but there’s other software out there that’s good already so if we wanted to try this again I think we should use something else instead)
• Generally buggy/over-javascripty UI
• Generally hard to follow new content on Lemmy: it tries to imitate reddit too much I think so stuff that’s “Hot”, whatever that means, get surfaced but you have to constantly switch over to a non-algorithmic timeline if you just want to see what you’ve missed

I’d still like to find a way to build community between XMPP projects, but I’ve started to think it may be better if projects interact with other existing instances more that aren’t focused on XMPP, this spreads the message a bit better. I forget who made this argument early on, so apologies for not letting you know directly, but I think the experiment has brought me around to this way of thinking as well. I will follow up after we decide what to do with a list of possible places that it might be good for XMPP projects to join if I can remember to put it together.