From what I've read, the troll farms mostly operate funded by Russia but are physically located outside of Russia. For example, Macedonia had quite a few.
That's actually really good thing. In the U.S. not wanting to kill trans people makes you a "far left" person according to right-wingers. real "far left" people are pretty nuts, man. The vast majority of us are moderates who are now labeled as "far left" in the U.S. political discourse.
Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.
As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.
quick summary of the most notable instances i've read about:
lemmy.ml is run by pro-china folks. there's some drama surrounding that. it is defederated (fully or partially) from some other instances.
lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance. if you want to find something reddit-like, this would probably be the first place to try.
beehaw is a much more private instance that only has a few moderators but has stricter standards on being nice to one another. it ended up having to defederate with lemmy.world early on because it couldn't handle the moderation load from too much content.
kbin.social happened to pick up a lot of tech type folks for some reason. it was just a side project from one dev so it was not as polished at first and barely survived the incoming users but it's in a good place now. he's got a few folks helping him so the future looks bright to me at least.
I've been using Mastodon since Twitter was taken over by Musk, so I'm not a super long-term user, but I can give my perspective:
Platforms like kbin / lemmy are more like "topic" communities. Like people on kbin create "magazines" and on lemmy they are actually "communities". From the user perspective, you can just look for these communities you are interested in and sign up to get updates from them.
Platforms like Mastodon are more like you and specific people you like to see content from. So you find people you like to hear from and you follow them to get their updates. They may post on subjects you aren't interested in but oh well, that's up to them.
Both formats can produce desirable, tight-knit communities, but they just use different structure. In my opinion, the kbin / lemmy style is more accessible in terms of finding people interested in a specific subject but feels less personal since you are just all there to talk about a specific subject. On Mastodon, when I find people posting content I like, I end up learning more about the random nonsense they are interested in. Like my feed there has a ton of moose pictures now because one person I followed likes to post pictures of moose. I don't mind seeing them, but I never expected to see so many moose.
TLDR: Mastodon is about following people, kbin / lemmy are about following topics.
It took me a while to accept cloud storage but I use it now. I backed up all of our family photos on Google photos.
Boosts are like retweets and Upvotes are like likes. On a threaded discussion format like this, boosts are kind of pointless, so nobody uses them.
I had a couple of Motorola phones back in the day. Most recently I had a Moto Z2 Force, which had a shatterproof screen. I really liked that because around then I had my first kid and kids cause accidents all the time. LOL
Yeah, but they aren't fun if you run into cheaters. They're a blast if you play with some of your friends. There are other similar games too, so I recommend you give the whole genre a shot.
This drives me nuts. Why do his moronic cult followers keep giving him money? He's a "billionaire." LOL