I hear your frustration, but there are other options. They won't necessarily be the same, or perhaps equivalent in every way, but they do exist. You don't have to use the same corporations over and over again.

The act of collecting the location data should be illegal. Selling it should never have been possible.

It's a small step, but does not solve the issue of location being tracked to start with. A better law would be to ban the tracking of location without consent, along with banning requiring location tracking for services that don't technically require it.

Sounds like something is incorrect in your setup. Nothing Lemmy does requires x11, dbus, or any display technology.

It's good to be popular. Congratulations on the growth!

Jabber (XMPP) or Matrix/Element.

Run your own instance. It's the only way you'll be able to set your own policies. Otherwise you're subject to policies of the instance you're on and those policies may change at any time.

Nope. It's public. Assume everybody has a copy of everything sent over ActivityPub.

It's developers working on their time to build an app they want. You don't have the right to demand they do things your way.

Just set 'Only Admins can create Communities' in your instance. Then people can sign up, comment, and participate, but can't create communities.

You'd still need to moderate comments, and posts made from your instance though.

So you want me to visit one of the greatest surveillance capitalist and privacy abusers video website to get tips on how to help people understand why privacy is important? Yah, about that. No.

I run multiple nodes for my Lemmy instance and it seems to work fine. They all talk to a single instance of PostgreSQL though.

I host my own. I'd say my contacts are split between XMPP and Matrix with many people having both. A lot of business use self hosted XMPP servers too. For example, Cisco communications solutions are based on XMPP.

The issue with free public servers is that you have no accountability. If they go away, or are left unmaintained, there's nothing you can do about it.

My two cents, host at home, or at an infrastructure provider you pay for service.

Nextcloud and Phonetrack maybe? https://github.com/julien-nc/phonetrack

Mastodon and friends are built as open conduits with very little in the way of safety or permissions. Spam should be expected.

It's not a Fediverse vulnerability. It's a Mastodon vulnerability. Don't want spam? Use a better fediverse technology.

Your post will be stored on both instances. Any media like pictures or videos will only be stored on your instance. Media will be referenced if the content is being viewed on another instance. At least I think so.

The mods at lemmy.ml moderate the content that is hosted there. That includes copies of content that originate elsewhere, such as your instance. You're still responsible for moderating the content your instance sends out regardless of where it is sent to. For example, this post will show up at lemmy.ml. The mods could delete it, or ban me, but the post will still exist on my instance and be readable to the general public. At least that is how I understand it.

Taking a closer look at it, I think the user online, and subscriber count are tied to your instance. At least for me, both those values are 1.

The rest are probably tied to the community, or specific posts in the case of votes.

Setup a Koel instance at a host of your choice. Upload your music to it and stream from that. See https://koel.dev/

Personally I think it's a great idea. I run my own instance even though I'm the only user and have no communities.

Pros:

Moderation: Your own moderation capabilities. It's your choice what you see or don't see.

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don't have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Performance: Generally speaking you'll have better performance. You won't have to worry about an influx of new users taking the instance down due to overloads.

Cons:

Domain: You need your own domain, which is an ongoing cost.

Hosting: Like the domain, you need to pay for hosting to run Lemmy. You could try running it at home, but I would not recommend it.

Management: Depending on how you setup Lemmy, there will probably be ongoing maintenance work. It might not be worth the hassle when you can just use a third party instance and let them deal with it.

Ultimately it's up to you.