I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it'll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it's a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they're just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.
edgerunneralexis
Using GraphineOS on a Pixel 6. It's very nice! I haven't had any problems with it.
I personally prefer a self - hosted Revolt instance. It's not federated or anything, but it's fast and nearly identical to Discord with some extra nice features, and it has a first party docker container so it's extremely easy to set up. I didn't go with Matrix or anything like that because it's harder to set up a natural system where you have a server, but then that server has many channels, and that's very important to how my friend group communicates and hangs out.
I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock
Yup, that's honestly the history of the world — people giving their autonomy and independence and concern for what's really going on in the world away to authorities in exchange for ease, comfort, convenience and habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It's the eternal struggle against apathy.
It would be amazing if Lemmy implemented silencing/muting instances, it would make a great middle ground between fully federating or defederating so that it's less binary and absolutist, and allows more individual freedom within mod actions. I think having a spectrum of choices when it comes to interaction will help social media networks a lot, because it means there are more ways to deal with problems and it more mirrors real life social groups, which means the dynamics are less artificial and distorted.
Well, yeah you shouldn't shit on them for not having gotten to features you want yet, but it's also okay to talk about how important and crucial some features are. And yes, I agree that the best solution is to lend them a hand in building the features you want! I know Rust pretty well and would love to help out tbh, but I have a serious disability that makes extended focus on cognitive tasks very difficult and deleterious, so all I can really do rn is cheer other people on.
Also I've heard the main two Lemmy devs are actually being paid to work on it, which isn't surprising to me as a lot of software companies will pay their employees to work on open source projects. So it isn't totally free labor.
I agree that those are the three really big flaws that need to be fixed ASAP. Especially one and three. Without those, the federated/decentralized nature of Lemmy is hamstrung. With them, it becomes much more powerful. We need to get the devs on these flaws before Lemmy blows up more than it already has, everything else can wait imo
We need to crowd source a common list of instances to block from users and mods across the network for instances to use, like people on Mastodon started doing. It was really effective. Defederation is really the only way to deal with / only check on users that sign up on instances that don't moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators can't effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. That's why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise it'd be filled with trolls doing their thing with absolute impunity and there would be nothing mods, who are supposed to be the first line of defense for that kind of thing, could do,
So in terms of beehaw vs lemmy.world I would be on instance 3 - I can see and participate both, their defederation from each other doesn't affect you, it only affects the users of beehaw or Lemmy.world
This aspect is really crucial for people to understand, so I wanted to emphasize it. This is what gives the Fediverse it's hyper free nature, where if you don't like which instances your instance has chosen tp block, you can always switch to a third instance and have access to both your old instance (thus solving the network effect) and the new one (thus giving you freedom of association). This sort of connected-by-default design choice (I.e. using blacklists instead of whitelists) is also crucial for maintaining the general interconnectivity of the network thats crucial to its functioning.
Also, to be fair, there's much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don't have an overall karma score, so there's not really any incentive to karma farm.