I don't think your assumption on how well I understand how the professional world works is correct.

I understand very well that signing any NDA is by no means "zero risk", it has a definite risk attached to it. Declining it is costly in some way, but also has definite advantages.

I also understand that very rarely is the phrasing ever "this conversation will be off the record", but rather some phrasing including the specific topics that may not be shared, like you say for example, product details. Blanket phrasings like this are always very sketchy.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous. There 100% would be an NDA involved.

The fediverse is all about being open, starting with an NDA is definitely not "zero risk", you can not slip up ever, or you're going to be destroyed by lawyers, this is the exact opposite of "zero risk".

To be precise, they were talking about monthly active users in the post, not total user accounts, which you are talking about. Might be that their stats only count people who actually voted/commented/posted something.

Ah yes, /r/technology, the only technology subreddit on reddit. There certainly has never existed a https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/, or / https://www.reddit.com/r/technewstoday/ or a bunch of more technology subreddits. No. Of course there ever only was /r/technology. No fragmentation whatsoever on reddit.

Subscribe to both, whenever a post in one is made, copy it to the other to receive that sweet sweet karma

Unciv

Of course there are, there's lots of cool people in the world. However, it's still disheartening to see that the vast majority is not.

When you go around anywhere, you've got to expect that 95% are just ignorant or don't care. But 5% of people that do care is still a lot and for me enough to not be completely discouraged.

To expand, every user has their custom set of content that they want to see, which needs to be queried from the database. Mainly their subscriptions, those will rarely be the same between any two users, and they need to be aggregated according to the sorting method the user wants. Or other personal things, like every user's messages/replies/notifications/settings.