Thanks for your efforts! The only sound conclusions on their side would be to shut off unauthenticated endpoints returning valuable data.

If I'm not mistaken, lemmyverse.net did not always report properly from lemmy.world and there is a community with slightly more subscribers (https://lemmy.world/c/technology with 49.8k subs today)

Probably user active during the past 6 months (posting, commenting, ...) vs user active during the past month

Javascript

It was my understanding from years ago. If it changed in between, I stand corrected.

Actually, it seems like engagement is through any kind of interaction, commenting, upvoting, even downvoting, are used to boost a video visibility, because, as you say, their ultimate goal is maximizing money from ads.

OP is right to support creators via comments.

Note also that YouTube has automatic filters for comments, which will remain visible for its author only, but the creator can also shadowban someone from their channel.

First of all, thank you for creating Lemmy!

• Are you confident that ActivityPub is the right protocol for large numbers of users/communities/instances? I've read about concerns about the scalability of ActivityPub due to its "push" nature, and I'm wondering how reliable those concerns can be.
• Is there a "right" maximum size for instances (user or community-wise) so that the load and reliability is properly spread?
• (On behalf of a colleague not yet using Lemmy) Is it planned or enviable to provide OAuth/OpenID for auth, so that a user could have created an account in instanceA but log in to instanceB with the same account; potentially reducing the load on instanceA and/or allowing interaction with content federated with instanceB but not instanceA?

15 years and almost went to a stop going there (I setup a RSS feed for 3 subs, but I actually manually check them twice a week to make sure I'm not missing on important news)

The fediverse as a whole is getting more and more interesting this year. Sure, it's still lacking in amount of content, but it brings me "good enough" content to avoid feeling like I'm missing something.