You sign up on (or create) an instance that defederates from them.

No issues here.

I’ve found that similar communities on different instances can have VERY different experiences in terms of the community and attitude. I know I’m generalizing, but I feel a lot of Lemmy.world instances are more negative and hostile than similar instances on beehaw.org. Personally, I’d rather they stay separate. That way I can be more precise on dialing in the experience I want.

Yes! This is what I’m referring to.

I’ve pretty much completely left Reddit since Apollo shut down. I’m happy with Lemmy, so far, except I’m honestly getting tired of the somewhat elitist attitude and fear/anger towards anything that isn’t in the fediverse. I noticed it when I left Twitter for Mastodon too, and it’s kind of getting old.

I’m not saying some of what’s being said isn’t justified, it’s just not what I feel like seeing every time I open the app/site.

I don’t think it’s too busy at all. It looks great on my home screen.