Yeah not having stories is a huge shortcoming.
pixelswarm
The retention is bad because the new user experience is abysmal. It takes a lot of effort, even for a tech savvy user to get Lemmy & Mastodon to a usable state. Most people are not going to do that and will churn out when there's no interesting content and the app does weird things like shows you the same posts over and over, if you don't manually change settings for things like "hide read posts" in Voyager.
This quote seemed pretty illumative of the MAGA rush, "It felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you’re in middle school." I think MAGAs are very insecure people deep down, like bullies in a school yard. I can imagine them feeling important being able to assert their asinine (and hateful) opinions.
Yes a little known part of WW2 history was when Hitler was defeated by angry phone calls, which drove him into despair and suicide.
It's not just the US. The far right is gaining momentum in Europe too, and the same will sooner or later repeat there (and I'm guessing sooner). Only a civil war in both the US and Europe will fix this now. Anyone passing the blame and not being prepared to fight themselves is part of the problem.
People want transient videos that don't stay in the gallery.