This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly... repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)
People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I'm not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.
Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long "video essays", rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?
All the rest: yup.
Speak for yourself! I want it known that *I* for one, am *very* immature!:-P
Ah, that part "without rational grounds to do so" makes such a huge difference doesn't it? :-D
Like e.g.:
Ignoring all the genocide done by Russia, and China, and North Korea, but hyper-focusing on the not even direct but mere indirect aid to the actual genocide-doing people, and even then painting with an extremely broad brush and saying that nobody who thinks otherwise exists within the group on that "other side".
I disagree though that it is directed at "random" people. Hexbears yes (it's kinda their whole thing!:-P), perhaps Lemmygrad.ml too (whose content definitely appears on your instance) - though importantly, Lemmy.World (which this community is based in) defederates from both of those, and has ~80% of the monthly active users btw (thus the userbase "here" only partially but mostly may not be thought of to include those 2 instances, depending on how you look at it?) - and yes also that mod of Lemmy.ml who told the person to kill themselves seemed fairly random as well (yet all the more troublesome since lemmy.ml is federated by nearly every instance, the only exceptions being tiny single-admin ones). But the above image, note from the URL that it is from lemmy.ml, seems not entirely "random" to me - it is instead very much "directed", at a particular group. As that style of propaganda tends very much to be... not "random" at all!
Although conservative Alt-Right sources appeared on Reddit as well, so both sites have a hefty amount of "alternative fact" sources. Moderation efforts are a more limiting resource on Lemmy so it makes sense that there is more of it here, overall. So long as we allow the lure of communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml to sway us as we retain federation with those instances that not only allow but propagate that content, from the very site instance admins themselves, the situation will remain - the only recourse being for people to either leave their instances and go somewhere that allows defederation (either instance-wide such as the tiny lemmy.cafe or quokk.au; or switch to Mbin or PieFed that allows full content blocking of any instance that any user specifies, without needing admin approval). Edit: I forget to finish my sentence there: or else get an app that provides that functionality (I don't know which ones).