Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

Cutting my own hair, I’ve screwed it up a few times now. My favorite was when I was just going to give it a little trim, but the guard popped off of the clippers mid-stroke and took a huge chunk out of the side/top of my head. So I was rocking a buzzcut for the first time in 15+ years. Turned out I liked it once I got over the shock, so I’ve been doing it intentionally ever since

It’s just hair, it’ll grow back eventually.

Especially true when the name of the instance in question is exactly what people are going to be punching into a search. They got in on the ground floor, they’ll be just fine.

I love my old Saddleback bifold. It was pricy, but it’s still in great shape 10+ years later. It’s also a bit bulky, but that’s by design to keep them durable.

It’s a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we’re looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for the primary.

I think the other way around is more likely. Their users having normal access in and out, but outsiders having limited access to Meta content. Going for the “exclusive club” vibe and making the users feel “special” will keep most of them in the garden.

While true, this only affects people who are hosting and running their own instance. And if they’re doing that, it isn’t that big of a deal.

Users that might struggle with the concepts are probably joining larger instances that are already federated, so the problem is solved as soon as they find the “All” button.

YT ReVanced has Sponsorblock built in, it can skip those ads for you. It is community-run though, somebody has to have watched it first to flag that segment.

That said, I usually let those run to support the channel. The creators aren’t making much from standard ads, but I’ll watch the ones they actually get paid for.

They hit r/LemmyMigration and it’s creator once already, right before they announced the Spez AMA. They were quietly unbanned after a while with claims of it being a “mistake”.

I have a feeling they’ll try a much more thorough purge soon, despite all evidence showing how disastrously that would backfire.

A lot of current users are young enough that they don’t have any experience with those things, centralized services are all they’ve ever really known. The simplicity and convenience can be a huge draw for a lot of people.

These things sort themselves out organically with some time, but it looks and feels messy until then.

It very well could in the future. But the federated model slows it down compared to Reddit et al. where there’s centralized control, at worst a single instance will develop a contained hivemind. If that happens to yours, you can just hop to a new one. If someone is really concerned, they can just spin up their own brand new instance, or fork the code and create something themselves.

In the longer-term, we’re more likely to see the opposite problem. The in-depth communities are going to be niche by definition, and interested users will be fragmented across similar communities on different instances. 100 different groups of 10, instead of a single group of 1000.

But those “groups of 10” are much more pleasant than Reddit has been for years. That could change in the future, but for now there’s passion and enthusiasm wherever you look.

It used to be MacOS, but I jumped ship as soon as iOS stuff started creeping in years ago. Because I had already jumped ship from iPhones for the exact same stuff. Arch is my *nix of choice these days, or Linux Mint if I’m recommending it to someone else who doesn’t want to learn Arch.

But with that said, my daily driver is a Windows machine these days. I’m getting lazy as I get older, so (relatively) effortless compatibility is king.

It’s a nice lighthearted nod to the exodus, and also a nod to the subforums that came before Reddit. Communities may be the “official” name and I try to use it when talking to others, but they’ll always be sublemmys in my head.