This particular thing IS a common-sense technicality. Without it, every new instance, the second it came online, would start to try and mirror THE ENTIRE FEDIVERSE.

The ideal would be some kind of in-between, but that's a lot more complex, and involves the developers making decisions for you in terms of what to pull in and what not to.

lemmy-federate is the wrong solution to this problem. It duplicates data on all instances, even those with no subscribers. it increases the load and the amount of storage requirements for small instances

What we need is a system where admins can set up a separate discovery service, and include that in search results. Mastodon is finally doing something in this direction, and Lemmy/PieFed/mbin would benefit a lot to adopt it.

I'm pushing for major Piefed instances to be able to network together, so when one instance adds or federates a new community - it will automatically network to other piefed instances.

That admin instance function would of course, have to remain optional though - as small personal instances would find that welcome - but it would automate a lot of this.

You should look into these accusations first to have a fully formed decision. Sentiment on Lemmy is super pro LGBTQ+.

thanks! also, I think as things are now, it's fine to keep using lemmy for your server. but keep in mind that in the future they could implement features that are not for the benefit of your community. anything can be reverted with some custom development, but you may not want that.

there are some lemmy instances that are planning a switch to piefed, with a database migration so that existing content and users are kept. the one I use is among them.
updates to lemmy can make such a migration harder in the future, even unintentionally.