These were the two factors for me. I tried beehaw first, but after submitting my application and waiting an hour or so, I still couldn't get in. Whether or not the application is a good idea overall, it's a barrier to entry. With the blackout I finally decided to be a brave boy and try to figure out the fediverse, and after overcoming that major hurdle I'm met with a literal gatekeeper. I haven't bothered to check if I ultimately got in since I have am account here now.

So then I'm right back to the drawing board doing searches figuring out which other servers are stable, have decent policies, aren't run by sketchy folks, etc. It was a lot, but this servers reputation having run a mastodon server is what got me to come here.

I think a lot of people are like me and will get curious about lemmy and want to dive in one afternoon to see what it's about. They don't want to spend an afternoon researching like their setting up a smart home ecosystem. Then to be met with gatekeeping, your going to lose people. Maybe that's fine in the grand scheme of things.

Oh for sure

And it really doesn't have to be an essay. I got approved with like 8 words.

I agree, having to spend a minute to write something is good, my server also does it.

Ugh that was my biggest gripe with reddit. Open a thread just to see the same 5 jokes repeated over and over in different ways to try and reap karma.

I think the federated nature of the platform may help to reinforce those positive attributes. Unmoderated instances with low quality content are at risk of being defederated, and as evident by the mod log, the mods do enforce rules on inflammatory and low quality content.

this

😂😂

The time has finally come to talk about Rampart!

That's pretty much it for me. There's a lot of complexity in hosting that you don't have to do if you use someone else's instance. There's a risk that their server goes down, but most people who start big servers know what they're doing.

Its also advantageous to join the instance you want to interact most in. Interacting across instances is possible but still a little buggy. It's harder to find communities, and once you do, sometimes posts don't load.

In addition to that,

• I like the challenge of leaning new technologies and hosting my own web apps
• It lets me feel that I have a bit more control over my user and posts
• I get my own vanity domain / user address
• I get a good understanding of how the lemmy frontend, backend and database work (yay open-source!)
• I can keep my instance up to date with the latest lemmy releases (some are still running 0.17.3!)
• I can do some dev work and testing on my instance, if I want, without impacting others
• it reduces load on the main instances

There’s more, but I think that’s a good enough list for now. Have a nice day!

There are so many, you'll have to check them out

Haha, there's a tricky calculation to be done there depending on how long they've been out of the oven versus how long the downtime is if you want to avoid being over or under steak-baked.