Very few people want to take the time to properly research things, and yes the popcorn crowd follows irrational behaviors, which (unfortunately?) makes decisions that result from that process incorrect. As in, even if the end goal had itself been correct, it having been arrived at via incorrect procedures makes it incorrect. So no, neither you nor I are part of that crowd, since our aim is truth.
The problem with the irrationality crowd is that it enjoys cloaking itself in truth as much as possible, right up until it does not anymore. e.g. even if both of us agreed with that crowd on every single matter (which we've both said that we do not, but hypothetically speaking), we still would not be "with" them since inevitably the search for truth will go one way while the campism+schadenfreude crowd will choose to go where we dare not follow. Or at least I have resolved in my mind that much, and I would suppose you as well but ofc cannot speak for anyone else (perhaps even my far-off future self? though I can certainly make educated guesses:-P).
One corollary to all of this might end up being that the Fediverse experiment has failed. I highly (99.99%) doubt that, but on the spectrum of total success being having reached a lofty goal of having at least as many if not more people on a federated platform as one of the mainstream platforms like X or even Reddit, vs. failure meaning that mere thousands of people remain here... I do think that the Anarchist Flotilla's pact is working more to cause failure than success. AN defederating from LW does not concern me one bit, and quite frankly the same is mostly still true in reverse, but taking the entirety of /0 with it, as the #7 most populated instance on the entire Threadiverse, will cause a major schism. Perhaps the Threadiverse experiment has already failed - certainly what happened to Lemm.ee, lemmynsfw.com (even if fedinsfw.app has bounced back, now with sth like 2x the subscriber count as the flagship instance PieFed.social?!), etc. has not helped.
People already avoid coming here since there is so little content, but second to that they avoid coming here due to toxicity e.g. leftist in-fighting / purity testing, and because this place is "confusing" to them to figure out. People being kicked off lemm.ee since it ceased to exist out from under them, then fled over to /0, and now finding ~50% of all Threadiverse users and perhaps 90% of the most popular communities taken away from them... this is going to send people back to Reddit.
We talk here as if this is the place to go to get away from Reddit. But in reality people are turning to smaller Reddit subs and touching grass irl, and Reddit is increasing their subscribers as people flee here to go there, or at maintaining stable numbers as people don't leave there to come here anymore.
So not total, utter failure as in 0% success, but perhaps single-digit success percentage as we have to now "manage expectations" moving forward with the reality as it is rather than it coming anywhere close to what we hoped we could achieve, together.
The Left always eats its own. And thus turns away centrists who thereby become neutral, which means that the Right wins by default... and thus the cycle continues turning. Same as it ever was.
