Thanks for writing that out. I didn’t post this intending to break rules or stir up drama. I thought it was interesting on its own merits, in essence the same as “How I left Scientology” or “How I left Jehovah’s Witnesses”. I also thought the mention of dwindling users was interesting. If you’ll excuse the LessWrong link (which is a site with its own weird in-group thinking), here’s an essay called “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs” that talks about that effect.
I can’t really seem to find a good way to see active user growth over time. That site has a chart at https://lemmyverse.net/instance/hexbear.net/user-growth, but that only goes back to January, and a simple user count isn’t really enough to say anything. Something like https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats but per-instance would be pretty informative, especially going back a few years.
At any rate, this is the sort of productive conversation that I thought would be good to have about the post.