Privacy was never a promise of the decentralized web

I agree with that. I am not looking for privacy on Lemmy. I'm looking for anonymity. I can use a pseudonym which is not publicly tied to me. Could the NSA figure it out? Ofc! But my threat model is big tech automated surveilence. And a little bit too, doxing by unhinged randos. So I want to break that link.

because ActivityPub is so unintuitive and complicated for less technical users.

That, I don't get tho. I signed up a few months ago. Literally all I had to do was pick a handle & pw, and fill a box asking why I signed up. I think that was to weed out bots. How successfully, IDK. Then I could post to this very group, a few hours later after I got approved.

Reddit was like 1000X harder! I tried and gave up. Got shadow-banned instantly, on my first post. A post to help someone with a computer prob. I posted in good faith! Tried to contribute positively. There are endless stories of ppl signing up and insta shadow ban, or they can't post without karma, and can't get karma without posting, and all their posts are hidden. That's harder to explain to less technical ppl, than, fill out this form, and wait a little bit.

For the mo, lemmy seems nice enough, and was easy to sign up and use. Almost too easy, I'd say. B/c I think it'll get overrun by bots and info warfare agents eventually.