Fediverse

I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been "using Lemmy" for 1.5 years now. "Lemmy" isn't a service the same way Reddit is, it's a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

You've been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

Nobody wants to hear this, but there's no "Lemmy". This emergent network of social media sites isn't a coherent thing, and it's not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they're doing informs how they behave.

You've been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don't get to pretend otherwise because of where you're reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

You're going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it's not.