Given the above I find it to be no surprise that many (the majority) of PinePhone buyers/fans/onlookers have no interest or skill to improve the device or service: they’re here because they’re fedup by some part of the current status quo and don’t want to wait for a more mature offering (which by the way would negate a lot of Martin’s initial complaints).

This is 100% where I am. I'm sick to death of everything I own trying to suck up personal data and then use it to manipulate me for profit. It's like having a sociopathic lover who knows everything about you and is hell-bent on ruthlessly exploiting you. I will not stand for it; I demand control of my data and my hardware.

The mobile space is where this is the worst. I run a custom Android ROM, but as a "mere" superuser who's not a professional coder, there's only so much I can do in an environment that's fundamentally structured against me. I fervently want open source mobile hardware to succeed, and I don't have any relevant technical skills to contribute.

I don't know what to do other than buy the hardware to show that there's support for this. Do you have suggestions?

Because mods might conceivably be bad actors. This could lead to various forms of harassment.

You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml.

Sure, but again I come back to the question of, what's the point of being federated then? I may as well just be using a local client to present me with a set of RSS feeds from different websites or something.

What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms.

And that's how I'd assumed Lemmy was going to work until I saw this post. It seems intuitive to me that subs of the same name would at least have the option to "sync" across servers.

Makes sense not to do it by default, but I think the option to form a single coherent community across servers is crucial to avoiding platform-killing fragmentation. Otherwise what's even the point of being "federated?" It's just a bunch of separate servers.

Shit, is this not how Lemmy is intended to work already? I'd assumed this was part of it being "federated." Clearly I have some things to learn.

Just for the record, I'm very much against this. I consider it a serious privacy problem if mods can see a list of subscribers.

Same. I'm starting the transition in earnest as of today.