Every day I relearn that Neocities still exists I'm surprised. I also had no idea it was open source! Thanks for the info! I honestly love the "small web", and neocities really has a large portion of those kind of sites. I also follow some Bear Blogs, though I think it's rare to find comment sections on these sites, so communication is limited to emailing if this was to be considered social media. But it definitely makes me feel more cozy than any of the corporate owned media sites.

I have both Matrix and Revolt, but they remain empty unfortunately. The advertised public servers are so full I usually leave within an hour. And I can't get my friends to join my Matrix channel instead of the discord server they are used to using. I also fully admit that real time chatting is just not my thing, so my bias is definitely towards non-real-time social media sites. Growing up with dyslexia and AIM, I'd always feel really insecure about spelling things correctly and it always takes me a while to send a message. Again, fully a me-issue that other people generally don't have, but I can dream haha

To be honest, I forgot there is a web version of discord people can use. Also, I guess I didn't go into it because I was being long winded with the rest of my message, but every barrier to entry if you want to sustain a small community has a chance to kill it or limit the addition of great users who would otherwise keep it alive. I'm sure a ton of people would like to join something like lemmy, but don't because the concept of federated servers is a real barrier for those people. Discord feels like a major barrier since you can't really find the kind of community you really want to join since you can't taste test the content of the server before you join. The discord servers I'm in are either based around a community that's already popular and it is an extension of that OR it is a more organized version of a group chat with my friends. I'm sure there are general purpose discord servers that manage to be small and friendly, but they seem really hard to find if you want to find them. It is fine if you want to connect to other people who (for example) all are fans of the same youtube channel, but if there's not that common thread, I'm not seeing how a community like that could start or thrive. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just haven't seen it before. I just think my main gripe against discord is being used by companies for troubleshooting so answers to common problems can't be searched on the web, which is an entirely different issue.

I guess the answer depends on the social media format, right? I think the old school PhpBB forums were peak for interacting with random people online (at least for me). An issue I've always had with things like Reddit and things similar to that is that there's no Avatar and signature to identify people in a conversation. And the forums that I was a part of, a moderator would always pop in to tell people to take it to PMs if there was too much back and forth conversation (or arguments) between 2 people if it got too heated, too personal, and started diverging too much from the main topic.

So, as far as "healthy" goes, I think my opinion is that communities should be more personal and much smaller. Lemmy definitely feels better to reddit and that's likely just due to the size difference and the fact that more of a percentage of us are real people and aren't part of some marketing campaign or karma farming bots. That way, there's more of a sense of community and people can remember your name from past posts/comments. If your "home" on the internet is slow and small, you won't feel the need to scroll endlessly since you can catch up to content.

As far as format goes, I like the idea of a feed (no text limit) where you can see generally what people are up to recently, but there's also topics people can follow that function more like forums. So then the question becomes should communities have artificially limited user counts and see everything (like Path was)? Or should there be a friends list so you only see things your friends are saying and the comments to those posts like facebook? I'm leaning towards artificially limited user counts since it guarantees a small and slow internet "home". And it's gotta be web based, unlike Discord communities.