Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^

aye, that's the real beauty of the fediverse; every person can find an instance which suits their preferences. those like us can find more hands-off instances if we want to, and equally people who prefer more moderation can easily find a more heavily moderated/curated instance.

But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.

maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don't care so much about lemmy growing. it's great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.

hell, maybe it's better that lemmy never grows as big as the centralized sites, the people who prefer all the advantages of decentralized social media can move here, whereas those who prioritize convenience/ease of use can stay on the big sites. the annoyance of defederations is in some sense just a part of how the protocol works, and not something that can be "solved" per se; the people who are here choose to put up with it in exchange for all the advantages.

one thing that could be done though, is for the lemmy software to have an easy option for migrating all your account data like mastodon does. the poor lemmy devs (literally just 2 dudes) are up to their necks in water just keeping track of the flood in the issues and pull requests right now, so it's not likely lemmy will get new features soon, but hopefully people will step in to help them as well. if i was good enough at rust (or programming in general) i'd try to help too.