This shit happens all the damn time where I live. By the end of the day it’s a trash pile as high as the container

No to lawns! Yes to native plants!

For Matrix, I’d recommend conduit over synapse, with the expectation that all of synapse’s features haven’t yet been added (most notably support for spaces, which may or may not be a dealbreaker).

It’s incredibly easy to set-up and very lightweight. I never self-hosted synapse due to how resource-heavy it is, and constantly had issues with dendrite racking up resources as well.conduit has honestly been the easiest thing I’ve self-hosted.

So when an instance is blocked, it means users on the blocked instance will no longer be able to see that instance’s content. For example, beehaw.org has now blocked lemmy.world. However with the way federation works, the content from beehaw is cached on lemmy.world servers. So you can only see what has already been cached; there will be no updated content on any existing cache.

Edit: here’s a recent post from kbin.social going into further detail on how federation works.

People who complain about “censorship” and “authoritarianism” while espouting the benefits of “freedom of speech” are exactly the type of people you don’t want around.

If there’s been discussion on lemmy.ml about this topic, I haven’t gotten around to seeing it. But from what I’ve noticed from witnessing this type of discussion all over the web is that these calls always come from either the most reactionary users or enablers i.e. those that would rather sit on the sidelines and either let it happen or put up a weak front because they have a right to “free speech.”

Unfortunately, this libertation-esque ethos runs deep in so many online spaces, where they’d rather have vague notions of freedom that obviously benefit them at the expense of others. Spaces like lemmy are not for them, and while there’s nothing lemmy can do about it, going against the grain and purging that type of vitriol is the best way to keep it from turning into the shitholes ranging from Reddit’s “enlightened centrism” to outright fascist spaces like *chans or gab.