Yes: it prevents things like death threats mods have been known to receive on the centralised Lemmy precursor.

In my opinion this runs counter to the idea of federation

The rest of the internet runs counter to the idea of federation, yet Lemmy must work with it.

You mean like lmmy.to?

Like lmmy.to?

They’ve set a separate display name that’s show instead of the name that also appears in the URL.

However, these relative links unfortunately don’t work on non-lemmy activitypub sites like mastodon and kbin.

And that’s exactly the reason why I created lmmy.to.

Yeah, it needs some styling. Which is not my thing really. Anyone want to help?

I got error 500 after entering my hostname.

Huh, now it’s doing the same for me too. Yet it worked when I tried it before.

Edit: fixed now. I seem to have accidentally re-introduced a bug somewhere in the process of launching the site.

Yes, because not every link is on Lemmy itself.

Sure. TBH most end users are not going to care about federation and just want to see what a community is all about.

That’s (probably, doesn’t work on my 0.17.4 instance) true, but it doesn’t work when creating links elsewhere (say you want to link to Lemmy from a certain site starting with an ‘r’).

It would help if Lemmy would treat navigating to an unknown instance to searching for it.

This is contrary to what the Fediverse is about.

I can understand how this doesn’t really fit well with the decentralised paradigm. I personally am more than proficient enough to deal with such shortcomings. However, it’s still a drag, and many other people will be scared away because of it.

I had been thinking about forking lemmy-ui and then tweaking the site to be more Reddit-like, but ran into build problems and a lack of time. But I’m still open to it.