That'd be cool, but just a simple reminder in case not, that you can simply make an account on that instance. There's no limit to what instances you're allowed to have accounts on or anything like that, so you can always do that.
Still for cohesion I get wanting it all together.
Honestly, owning up to it being a selfish decision deserves some respect. I'm a big proponent of free expression and avoiding censorship, but I took a gander at the kinda stuff they got over there and...
It's not even the views they hold that's my main problem. It's really that they're just so needlessly rude and aggressive, and as you pointed out, they seem to be a lot more censorship happy than here anyway. I would be more sympathetic to them if they were less censorship happy themselves, and if they were less mean.
I do want to stress that I hope you keep the number of blocked instances to a minimum, since I feel that it would be better if the Lemmy software had better tools for users to control what they block for themselves better, and also maybe just having "default" blocklists that users can disable, to keep the new-user experience nice, but yeah for that particular instance, I can't be too mad about it.
I came here because of the reddit situation, but I didn't come from reddit. I just heard about of bunch of people thinking about going to lemmy and thought it might be fun to try it out.
In my view this isn't the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they'll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don't actually care too much if Reddit dies. I'm happy as long as there's a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
Fedora has a pretty good amount of software in the repositories, so a lot of the time that's enough. When it's not, flatpak with flathub have most gui software covered, and outside of that, if we're talking about terminal or command line stuff, most of those have their own custom way to install them, or they just have self contained binaries that you can put in ~/.local/bin/.
I haven't run into many issues with flatpak like it sounds like you have, so that really covers a lot of it for me honestly.
That's what I've been trying to do myself. I'm really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I'm almost always a lurker, but I'm really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!
I'm really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It's a really cool idea!
For anyone who's interested in an alternative, check out https://codidact.com . It's much smaller right now, but it's open-source and the community is nice.
I have an account, but I don't really use it much. Not because I don't like it, but because I don't have much to say really. I'm more of the lurker type.
The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The "main" homeserver is matrix.org, but it's recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there's no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.
The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of "reference implementation" so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io
There's some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don't have to worry about those much at first.
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet's evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a "new beginning" for communities on the internet.
For an individual instance, yeah. But one of the points of federation is to make it easier for users to simply move to an alternative instance if something like that starts to happen. It greatly reduces vender lock-in.
But with the way the Reddit admins are handling the website, you wouldn't have had that sub for much longer anyway. That's the whole point of the blackout in the first place. Don't blame the protesters. Blame the admins. They're the ones with the power to change things.