I never expected them to change their mind, they know what they want and they know what sort of people they want on their platform and frankly it is not us.

Plenty of people including me are very glad about being pushed in a more fedi direction, and genuinely enjoy it here. Probably most of those people are older like me and feel very much at home with a bit of jank, with Mastodon's topic-based following system, etc etc. Because that's what the internet was like when we were first exploring it. We will 100% stick around.

For younger or less techy people though, the only thing that really gets them to use services is how easy it is. And that's fine too. We can have our own corner of the internet here to be dorks in, and they can have their own corner over there, and we can all still be friends just...you know...from a distance.

I'm really enjoying Lemmy's forum-focused platform, since it does feel like the old internet again, where I would actually want to engage in topics, rather than scroll through a hundred images and immediately forget most of it

I never really knew how much existed on the internet until around 2014, so I never got to experience things like IRC and small, engaging, and enthusiastic communities in their prime. I really hope Lemmy and the whole of fediverse takes off, cause I'm really enjoying it here.

And even then back in 2014 the discussions were so much more organic, I still remember a specially niche forum back then brimming with activity. It is alive and well but the userbase is reduced to a tenth of what it used to be. Fediverse platforms seem to be a return to form since corporate influence has been stripped away from them.

the discussions were so much more organic

Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I really just lurked on reddit and never commented. For every post that showed up in top/hot sorting, I already knew what the top 10 comments would be before I even clicked. And it's not even like echo chamber type comments, but more just the same old reddit-isms that would get used over and over again. Like every "discussion" is basically a race to see who can be the first to say the thing, and somehow those comments always end up getting the most upvotes. I've already seen a few getting used here on Lemmy. Hopefully the community will learn to stop encouraging that kind of behavior.