Question, is MiceChat connected to Disney corporate in any way, or are they a fully independent website, of/by/for disney fans?
I hope you see where I'm going with this question and the fact they are the largest community, still around from the "bygone era of the internet". If you allow FB/IG/Threads to gain their foothold, you will not be around 20 years later. If MiceChat had integrated into FB/Reddit/etc, they would not be around anymore, especially not in the independent way they are.
btw, I wasn't arguing in bad faith. the idea of the power hungry power mod of reddit is a widely known concept. Immediately trying to disregard my argument on that continues to show your fragility in your control of your community.
Idk if you're familiar with GenCon, a board game convention in Indy, but I've run the unofficial Discord server since 2017. While not even close to as big as the official server, made in 2020, the users have stayed on our little server and we still gain new users each summer. The thing is, I don't run the server like some big corpo project, but literally as a diy space where people can feel comfortable asking questions and getting to know each other, myself included. I don't ban folks without community input, because while I have the sole power to do so, it's not my community, it's ours. GenCon LLC has never reached out to me, because I'm not trying to do what they do, and I don't care about them because of the same reason. I'd wouldn't mind having a larger number of users, but at the same time, I'd rather keep the community feel homegrown, and not artificially inseminated (with money).
To bring it all around again, kbin and the fediverse works because it is homegrown and community based. Waaaaaaaay back when, Reddit was the same, but being centralized, that will cause problems, thus the problems of the past months. kbin and the fediverse at large (not so much just the AP protocol) will continue to succeed without corpo takeover and influence. It can breed discussion and community without trying to make money off of it. Give them an inch, and they will redefine what an inch is so that it includes all inches in perpetuity.