Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.

What’s the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don’t have enough “points” on their comments or posts?

It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you’ve mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.

Another way to do this could be account age testing, but this can be defeated by pre-registering empty accounts.

Codeberg works for me. I used to use a couple of indie instances of gitea for various smaller project, but both have either gone down or been at risk, so I mostly use Codeberg which is more organized and failsafe.

It’s pretty funny to see someone travel to a lemmy.ml thread and complain about lemmy.ml users being there.

Clean McStainKill

My approach if adblocking isn’t an option is switching tab/window and muting the tab (on a computer, that’s just two click at the top of the screen) or on a phone, muting and putting the phone out of view.

I’ve tried to make a couple of anonymous throwaways (for privacy reasons - I’ve never been banned) and they vanish pretty quickly, seemingly as soon as I share a link. Yes, even when not using a VPN.

I was already no longer posting on reddit through alternative front-ends since around 2018, because I disliked privacy issues with it. I was just lurking via alternate frontends (the precursors to Redlib, there were more before the API fiasco). I was already into the FOSS community and so I forget exactly how I came across Raddle and Lemmy (maybe through /r/piracy or /r/datahoarder, but could have been many other places), and Lemmy was far far far slower then, but when I landed on Lemmy I really wanted it to become a viable alternative to reddit.

I have heard the same sentiment about privacy, and from what I’ve seen in privacy tool communities (e.g. meshnets, where the densest networks I saw in the world were Germany and Catalonia, or Tor network where it’s common to find German nodes) this matches up.

That’s not true; there are plenty of logistics roles needed!

In seriousness; bloodless (or relatively bloodless) revolutions exist, but almost every time the ruling class is threatened, they choose the bloody route to cling onto power by any means necessary. I’ve seen my friends beaten by police just for protesting against the Zionist Regime, and that’s not even close to a revolution. So for all intents and purposes, we must accept that the necessary changes to society to fix all this, will end up violent.