Yes! I struggle to motivate myself to stick with hobbies. I love photography, making art, writing - but often the motivation is just lacking. But cooking? I’m biologically motivated to cook (most days) so it’s easy to keep up with. All I have to do is save recipes and plan ahead just a little

I don’t have an answer to your actual question other than self-hosting. But, I doubt you’d ever get a “firehose of trash” on your main feed. Mainly because the trashy instances aren’t that populous, so I doubt their posts would be active or hot enough to float to the top. But I could be wrong.

You could always go directly to the instance you want to read and lurk. Unless you make an account you won’t be able to comment, but you’ll be able to get your firehose of trash

Edit: Just be mindful of how much you consume, you’d be surprised how easily hate can invade your mind. To this day I still have to self-censor every now and then thanks to the hateful rhetoric I grew up around, even though I’m long past it

It will sort itself out. The only difference is reddit’s search function works slightly better because it’s centralized, but I think that issue will be solved eventually

How much does the API cost? /s

GenZedong and other communities shilling on lemmygrad. Some of these accounts post multiple pro-china, pro-russia, anti-usa articles per hour. I’m all for open discussion, but accounts like that are just propaganda pumpers

To be clear, not everyone and everything on lemmygrad is a tankie shill. We need places that are safe for discussion of political ideologies. But I mention lemmygrad because that’s where the tankies seem to be flocking

Tip: If you’re thinking about making a community, google it first, like this:

Let’s say I want to make a community for dogs. I’ll google “c/dogs lemmy” and some variations just to be sure.

This has been working for me. If it doesn’t come up, it probably doesn’t exist

What communities? They can be built here

If you turn your server off does that make your communities and account history invisible until you turn it back on?

Maybe not for the initial deluge, but with sustained growth the number of mods will grow too