

I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!
Honestly, no, none of the forums I ever used allowed that sort of things for, well, for obvious reasons!
Anyway, my reasoning for this is to help make it easier to mentally anchor a given interaction to a user. On things like Lemmy and Reddit I feel like it’s a constant sea of random usernames - there’s no persistence or community. I could well have spoken to the same person multiple times but I don’t notice because they’re so anonymous.
I feel a fundamental problem is the ephemeral post model. If one isn’t actively contributing frequently it’s effectively the same as not being part of the community at all.
Seeing lots of familiar faces in threads, even if they didn’t post today, helped.
With regards to your point though, I think it’s one of the reasons I’m not fussed about getting “everyone” onto a single platform. It’s too many people!