If you get kicked from an instance, upon joining a new instance, make your first post a furious comment on the admins/mods/hivemind of the instance that kicked you, completely forgetting we can all see the modlog.
It’s an isolationist policy. The US military doesn’t have military bases/presences across Europe (and elsewhere) out of the goodness of its heart or to protect Europe. They also do it because their military realises that its much, much better to have bases somewhere where they can strike an international enemy quickly from. It’s a militarily mutually beneficial arrangement.
So, the US would lose that early strike capability. They’d also lose all the intelligence benefits having people on the ground brings with it. Also, should it happen and Europe was successfully invaded, US businesses would either temporarily or permanently lose access to one of their biggest trade export blocs and a large amount of access to imports too.
Well, Mastodon has been around since 2016 IIRC which is nearly 8 years and it’s still growing and expanding. There’s no reason to suppose Lemmy will be any different.
A large part of the issue of sustainability is intent. Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Google etc are profit driven. By that standard, no fediverse software is sustainable because for-profits only care about continual growth leading to continual profit.
Lemmy is open source. No one who develops it or hosts an instance really cares about it being financially profitable so there’s not that motivation. The motivation is more akin to doing something positive for people and at the same time, indulge in a hobby/interest they have. If the people who benefit from it (you and me, the users) recognise that benefit I would hope they donate to its development and the instance they’re on. This in turn enables the users who can’t afford to donate to still be able to participate in a system where profit is not King.
So sustainability in the fediverse really means ‘can I afford to keep doing something I enjoy doing?’ As long as they can, it’s sustainable.
Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There’s no trackers, you’re not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.
Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.
Like Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are 'link aggregators’
This means, in subject driven Communities (sub-reddits), people post links or images or their thoughts and others comment on them
Reddit is software that’s installed in one central location (server). This means it is owned and controlled by one single commercial entity.
Kbin and Lemmy are both software that are installed in multiple locations (servers), owned and controlled by multiple people and can be installed by anyone. This means no one can ever own or control the entirety of Lemmy.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy can be accessed by users via websites or apps.
Reddit is centralised. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would be completely gone.
KBin and Lemmy are federated. If one instance (server) disappeared tomorrow, all the others would be unaffected and carry on as normal.
All instances of KBin and Lemmy can talk to all other instances of KBin and Lemmy, as long as they are federated.
Rule breaking and/or toxic instances/servers can be defederated by other servers/instances.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are all free to use. However, with Reddit you must contend with invasive privacy and advertising. The way to support KBin and Lemmy is to donate to the development team and the server/instance your account is on.
Just like with Threads, you have to ask - why are they doing it? What’s in it for them? How good an internet citizen are they? And the answers for me, just like Threads, are not good for the fediverse.
Some of the replies to people against Threads federating are that those of us who don’t like the idea are isolationists who don’t want the fediverse to grow. They’re wrong. Nobody I know is protesting WordPress federating, or Discourse or Flipboard or microblog or (if it happens) Tumblr. The fediverse getting bigger is not a bad thing. But the likes of Meta and reddit are not good internet citizens. Being picky and having standards about choosing to federate with entities like that is the most responsible thing we can do.
I totally applaud your efforts to find a solution to this issue but I don’t think this is practicable, at least in it’s current form. I get the underlying idea that changes to the extension will have to be continually adapted to by the scrapers but that’ll slow them down for a negligible amount of time.
I don’t mean to sound negative and I really do thank you for your efforts but I can’t see how this could be effective.