But it does matter, doesn’t it? My understanding is that your account data lives somewhere on the server you join, so you need to have some level of trust in that server. When I joined Lemmy yesterday, I saw some of the more popular servers were overloaded, so I joined a small one that seemed reasonable. But I guess that instance was having some trouble, and I couldn’t get content and search to load on the site. I swapped over to a more popular instance and seem to be running fine, so I guess it was instance-specific issues.

And also, I imagine an unreliable site could go down without warning, and take your account with it.

Or do I totally misunderstand how this fediverse thing works? Either case, it’s probably a decent idea to host your own instance if you can, but that introduces a pretty high barrier to entry.

Old fashioned ads are much less lucrative than highly personalized ads. It’s why so many sites require you to create an account to access their content. The end goal of the platform is to extract heaps of advertising data from you.

That’s my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They’re clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.

I’m glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.