That said, you can use a third party service only for sending, but receive mail on your self-hosted server.

Stop asking for pseuso-privacy features. The Fediverse is public by nature. Any “measures” to control access to the public posts on it are just lying to users.

Server owners should be able to control who can access their servers - but that is NOT - and should NOT be - treated as a privacy feature.

I don’t know where this myth came from, but you don’t have a right to erase your public posts from there internet under GDPR. See, for example, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/32361/does-a-user-have-the-right-to-request-their-forum-posts-deleted

If anything, you might have such rights under copyright law, if your posts cover the threshold for copyright. In that case, you can ask server admins to delete them, and they will have to comply. But the request has to reach them (if they’re defederated, the delete button won’t teach them, and you’ll have to contact them separately).

That’s only US courts. Other countries don’t even have a procedure for registering copyrights.

Well, people like to think that the fediverse is a genuine threat to Meta. And they like to feel they’re doing important work defending it from Meta. So this will indeed pop up again, and again, and again.

Still visiting several subreddits that don’t have corresponding active lemmy communities. Once of them actually has an “official” lemmy community (run by the same mods) but none of the people moved over, so it’s empty,

Anyone who still has to regularly visit Reddit because of all the niche subreddits that have great communities there but 1 post per month here.

Thanks for the clarification.

AFAIK lemm.ee fits all your requirements, what don’t you like about it?

Edit: Maybe I’m wrong. It’s run by Estonians, but looking up its IP, it point to the US, so maybe it’s not hosted in the EU.

Firefox + ublock (it has filters that block the “install app” on mobile, but need to be enabled from the settings) is useable.

To me, the smaller userbase is actually a real problem. I’m willing to stick it out and hope it grows. But for over half of the subreddits I subscribe to, the corresponding lemmy communities have 0 posts this last week.

Yes, I don’t need 10k comments on my posts. But memes or mainstream news was never the big value of reddit for me - I can get these anywhere. Instead it is about the niche communities with a few thousand subscribers. And for now, I still have to use reddit for them.

It’s not that users want to centralize everything. It’s Lemmy’s design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.

1. Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:

• Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
• Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
• In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a “moderated” feed (with communities selected by admins). The “local” feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it’ll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that’s more lively.

2. For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.