Asklemmy

Yes, and no. For me personally, I tended to use Reddit to follow a lot of tech news - whether that be about programming, Linux/Open Source Software, gaming, etc which from what I've seen personally, is certainly an abundance in The Fediverse. Otherwise I'll sometimes discuss some TV shows on Reddit, but most of mine are in their off-season so it hasn't mattered as much.

That being said, I do recognize that its a problem - but I don't know how to begin trying to do my part to fix that problem. I participate where I can. I don't really have many friends who would be interested in The Fediverse and they generally don't use Reddit (Lemmy) / Twitter (Mastodon/Firefish/Calckey/etc) / Instagram (Pixelfed) either way, aside from on the one off occasion that they're linked to something. I made my instance public in order to try to contribute, but no one is interested in joining small instances (and it was delisted from the join-lemmy site once they changed their user count requirement, which killed its only chance to organically grow so I don't think my "effort" will help much there anymore). The only subreddit that I created and moderated was r/moddedmc which I'm still surprised even had people posting on it (since I didn't ever advertise it, I suspect Modded Minecraft was a big enough subject on Reddit to carry its own discoverability) but a community for that already exists here and I don't play much Minecraft these days to contribute all that much.

I did a couple of small contributions to the Android Lemmy client Jeroba a few months ago, but my Android development experience is no where near equipped to provide any significant contributions to Jerboa or any of the other (amazing!) Lemmy Android (and from what I've seen, but don't own any devices that run, iOS) apps. Similar story for my knowledge of Rust to be able to contribute to Lemmy's backend itself... and don't even get me started on my absolute lack of ability to make anything that looks good on the frontend side of things. I created a small utility and a corresponding Grafana dashboard to allow instance admins to keep track of some stats regarding their instance, I see it has a few stars on GitHub though no one has provided any direct feedback on it so perhaps there are at least a few people getting some use out of it. I stay in the Lemmy Admin Matrix rooms to try to provide support to others where possible, but there are far more people who have way more experience (both professionally and on an instance level) than I do. Then finally, I do try to directly donate to Lemmy itself when I can.

So all in all, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what more I could potentially do to help. I don't mean for this to come off as a rant by any means, but I do honestly feel bad that no matter what I do that I think would help, it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. There are way better devs out there, way bigger instances, people with larger groups of friends who'd be interested, people with more interesting things to share, people who can probably donate more than the $5 than I get to (and probably more consistently), people with more knowledge on how to help other admins, and people who speak/write anything other than English. I'd say that at least I'm "here", but as someone who lives in the US based off the things that I do see on the Fediverse sometimes I get the impression that even this itself isn't well liked. So in the grand scheme of it all it sucks that I really enjoy the Fediverse and I wish more of the internet operated on open standards, and yet I can't find a meaningful way to give back.