First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.

However, I’m considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it’s even more cynical than reddit, and I’m losing interest in opening the app if it’s just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.

(Yes, I’m subbed to upliftingnews. That’s the 1%.)

Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?

I’ve been using the rif app with ReVanced patches and my own API key, much better than the 1st party app. Eventually it’ll probably break, but it works for now!

That’s very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn’t allow any federation with them to stay safe.

There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can’t seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.

Hello 👋 new to fediverse - what are the benefits of running your own and connecting in to these communities, compared to just making an account on an instance that already exists?

I imagine if you run your own, you don’t lose access to your account compared to if, say, your account is in lemmy.world and it goes down. Is there more to it?