Really interesting to read about your experiences - thanks for sharing.

I think what we have is amazing for a bunch of nobodies with no corporate cash. We’re all volunteers, building the social media we want to have. We should be proud of it, no matter what stage it’s at.

No matter what the challenges are currently, this is what makes the Fediverse so brilliant. It flies in the face of the system which is currently ruining almost everything in the world. It’s the online social facet of the all-encompassing reclaiming of power that has to happen for us to be a healthy society on a healthy planet. Lemmy (and the rest of the Fediverse as far as I can tell) basically functions in much the same way as the corporate social media it replaces, so it comes with the same downsides e.g trolling, being addictive, potentially misleading and so on. But the fact that it’s ours to develop/change/adapt, according to our own shared values, makes it fundamentally diiferent. We’re already seeing improvements over what it’s replacing and I’m really excited to see where it leads. In the grand scheme of things the mass use of the internet is still quite new and right here is at the cutting edge of navigating how it should work for us.