About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990?
Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen.
If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.
Let us not forget that in our current trajectory, Robots and Real Estate are going to be owned by one class of people who extract value from society while everyone else struggles to feed themselves.
Don’t rely on any of the big platforms long term.