Technology

since when did stock value reflect reality lol

Stock prices represent the market's expectation of future growth, not current valuation. Since the IPO, I've seen a lot more news articles referencing Reddit posts directly.

And when I go to Reddit, I only really see AI spam on posts with little engagement, on popular posts, they're pretty far down the list.

The problems you're talking about are a symptom of the larger reason federation won't take over: larger orgs offer a much more consistent experience. With Lemmy, for example, each instance responded to the huge influx of new users in different ways:

• close off new registrations and defederate (e.g. beehaw)
• require an application
• some other kind of rate limiting

And when we had an awkward update roll out, some stayed behind and some upgraded, which nearly completely broke federation.

This highlights the independent nature of the platform (probably the reason you and I like it), as well as the reason it won't ever really work for the average user. Regular users have a pretty low tolerance for changes and service disruption, and the federated nature of Lemmy nearly guarantees both. Some instance admins will lose interest and stop paying for hosting, other admins will be late on important updates, and instances will go down and the admin may not fix it for a few days or even weeks. Look at the uproar when Reddit goes down for an hour, Lemmy isn't anywhere near that level of long term reliability.

it sure seems like a lot of people are determined to make sure the fediverse does not succeed, including the devs themselves

I don't think anyone is sabotaging the fediverse, it's just the nature of a loose coalition of FOSS enthusiasts that all have different priorities. That's not a bad thing, but it is why the fediverse will remain a niche thing.