Tor is an application and technically doesn’t even has much to do with Linux itself, except that it also runs on it. Where you using a guide for installing and if so which one?

Both have their own instances: https://social.bund.de and https://social.network.europa.eu

https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-support-general:discuss.online

I’m pretty sure there is no particular reason why it’s done this way. It’s just the easiest method to coomunicate upvotes across different servers. There are already a lot of ideas for doing it differently or more efficient (e.g. vote aggregation) but that requires a more sophisticated architecture:

• Vote aggregation also makes faking votes much more efficient and requires different detection methods. Of course, a spam server can also invent users or votes but it’s a bit more complicated.
• Aggregation in any form can be hard to implement because it should be flexible enough to reduce load but not increase delay or make tracking a consistent state even harder. Finding the right configuration will be difficult and go through a lot of trial and error. Should be easier though now that more people are working on the code.
• Keep in mind that Lemmy should also be able to communicate with other services across the Fediverse like Mastodon via ActivityPub. I’m not sure if there is something in the standard for message aggregation yet. It’s definitely being discussed because Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube all have or went thorugh the same growth problems as Lemmy in terms of scaling, spam and security concerns. If there’s a good solution it will likely come through the AP standard.

In the browser when you hover over the display name, you should see the full username. I don’t know how it’s shown in the various apps but it should appear if you view the user’s profile.

TLDR: A bunch of trolls from that instance spammed dick pics and started concern trolling with “rational debates” about trans people. Beehaw mods and admins couldn’t keep up with modding the stuff and decided to temporarily defederate (that’s basically a one-sided block) from lemmyworld and and also shitjutworks because most of the spam came from there. Currently, the adminds of all three instances are working together to find a solution and get everyone refederated.

Initial announcement: https://beehaw.org/post/567170 Foolow up: https://beehaw.org/post/594843

Github is the right place s most of the development is discussed in the issues and PRs there. There’s also the Matrix space https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-space:matrix.org which has various chat rooms regarding Lemmy/Jerboa development.

Also you’re… me? :D At least our taste in usernames is very similar.