The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.

And... that if "activitypub just works" , so does XMPP.

And... XMPP servers offer better performance and taking less resources than any of the leading AP projects.

And... XMPP already has E2EE.

XMPP had social media even before ActivityPub existed.

1. You are still trusting the instance admin. What if the admin pushes a code patch that transforms every like into a dislike based on a keyword?
2. Your history will never be fully portable.
3. It creates some weird dynamic: are we going to start dividing ourselves into "instances that obfuscate voting" and "instances that prefer transparency"?
4. What is the criteria for "malicious"?

it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.

Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.

That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the "login with reddit" functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).

Obviously I'd need a webmail client

Why "obviously"? Plenty of open source, high quality email clients for desktop and mobile, and I can not think of any scenario nowadays where you'd be willing to access your email from an untrusted device anyway.

Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.

That, and the fact that simply there isn't enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it's a meta-topic, but for everything else it's mostly "let's pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and "let's pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested."

I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around "going dark" for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them "let's focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative." Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.

Everyone convincing each other in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner.

So when people vote according to what you prefer, it's validation of the problem. When they don't, it's "insanely toxic and dismissive". Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?

Who gives a shit about user experience anyways?

This is a type of "faster horse" case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in "centralized system" mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.

there are many communities that died due to lack of traction.

Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.

To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.

Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn't enough people interested.

What would help is that people stopped trying to find a "canonical place" to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it's been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.

Why does it have to be a whole instance? Why not just create a community for it and start posting content you find interesting?

How old are these disks? If wouldn't trust anything of value to an HDD (better to save them on a bunch of good quality DVDs or BluRay disks than relying on such old disks.

Sports and sports news. That's where we need to recruit.

/r/nba has 8 million subscribers. /r/soccer has 5 million.

We can have sport-focused instances, and we can have one community for each team from the major leagues. We can have "legal gray area" instances focused on video and streams for games that are not on TV or online.

Dontt get me wrong, I think the topics and instances you mentioned can be definitely interesting, but they all seem to be a bit of "preaching to the converted". We need to go after the people who look at Lemmy and think "there is nothing there that I don't get on Reddit, why should I bother to learn all that fediverse crap?"

My Fairphone 3 already has replaceable batteries. What is really missing is an industry-standard form factor, like ATX/ITX exists for desktops.

If there were a standard, we'd be able to upgrade the components as needed. We wouldn't be forced to waste perfectly good displays just because we would like to upgrade the CPU. Companies wouldn't be pushing for new upgrades every year. Apple/Samsung wouldn't be able to hold their dominance because it would be easier for smaller players to specialize in specific components. The entire maker community wouldn't have to be fighting over Raspberry PI and we could even have a cottage industry around upcycled consumer electronics.