Yeah, you join a general instance, get everything set up the way you want it, get comfortable using it for a couple of months, then it goes down. You track down the instance admins Mastodon account to see if there is an update. There is a single post saying “I’m aware this is down and I’m working on it.” You check several days later, no updates on your lemmy instance but several hundred cat photos each day and announcements about how “Mastodon was successfully updated!” Months go by, you think to yourself “maybe I should just go back to Reddit.” More cat toots, more info on the Mastodon instance, no lemmy news.

So after waiting for months, you decide to pick another instance. All of your old content is gone forever, so you try to rebuild. You start adding your communities back only to find out the admin has decided to defederate from the instances several of those communities are on for whatever reasons there may be. Your choices are to find another instance or find new communities hosted somewhere that you can access. You give up and just read whatever’s on the feed. You play with the sorting options and find out they all kinda suck because you’re using lemmy wrong, but find some good content and some people you’re happy to interact with. You get past the five to ten posts with any sort of engagement, it’s just bot spam with no engagement whatsoever and porn.