Frankly I think every stock-oriented subreddit is a controlled operation meant to pull value from the subscribers only. I doubt almost any thread on those subs are people authentically sharing their perspectives.

These aren’t global fediverse rules, they’re constraints meant to apply specifically to the new user experience on Lemmy only.

maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.

“At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”

This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.

Very inside baseball opinion. It’s like me describing reddit as “endless drama” because I read every thread on subreddit drama.

A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.

The goal was never to convince people who don’t know how email works to join, it’s to convince an average reddit user to join.