Maybe look at figuring out how to host your own instance? I’ve got mine running on a 2 thread, 1gb ram server that’ll cost me less than 10 usd a month. So far it actually seems to run rather smoothly.

Then you get to choose who you federate with.

And I get that, but I feel like there might be better options than an old boys club that requires endorsement to get in. For instance, maybe levels of trust? a newly federated instance gets rate limited or something, so that it can’t suddenly start spamming 1000s of posts or whatever

I’ve only recently setup my own lemmy instance, to test new stuff, fix a few things, whatever. Something like this would prevent me from federating with the content I want to see, and I’d have to go try and be buddies with a trusted instance admin to get endorsed?

I think this may be something we want to discuss more as a community, and see what better solutions might be out there