Technology

You're making good points, however I want to throw this in:

to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.

I'll rewrite the "echo chamber" into "appeals to users you care about". For companies like Reddit, mass appeal is important (and thus UX) because it's what draws in advertisers and thus money. As such you could argue that they're doing the exact same, with the motivation of making money instead of prestige or having a good time.

However, I do think that UX is highly important. My biggest gripes with Lemmy are currently:

1. It's too hard to join/browse a community on another instance. "Just put it into the search input" is fiddly, I mean, you click on that icon and now I have to parse some complex form just to find the most important bit, the search query itself, at the end. Why is advanced search the default? It should be there, but meh. I resort to building the URL myself which also sucks and doesn't work in Apps
2. That I have to do that at all is annoying. This isn't "federation bad", but more that it's just not there yet.

I'm wondering if Lemmy could copy the idea of Home Assistant. An example, go here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/octoprint/ and then look for the "My ADD INTEGRATION" button. Clicking it brings you to a simple site that asks where your Home Assistant is hosted and then redirects over to there to make that feature work. The most important bit: That redirection site remembers the setting.

As this little site stores the data as a cookie it's still not perfect from a UX perspective. However, it works everywhere you're using a Browser (And apps can just rewrite the pages) and, most importantly, it works without any server logic. Thus the Lemmy project could host it cheaply (for free) on e.g. Cloudflare Pages.