As I recall, there was an uproar back then as well when they started cleaning up subreddits. (/r/jailbait was one, /r/beatingwomen another, /r/fatpeoplehate, and a bunch of subreddits about various illegal activities.) People were really into “free speech over anything else” at that point.

In fact the vitrol directed at spez currently really reminds me of that, there were pictures of the then-CEO’s face everywhere along with “fuck Ellen Pao”. Then, funnily enough, spez came in (came back) as the replacement and people were happy again because he was one of the OG admins.

Under settings, you can uncheck ”Show read posts”, hopefully it will help

I have considered renting a VPS and giving it a go as well! (Is that still considered selfhosting?)

Do you think all the federated content will require a ton of storage eventually? I can imagine that I will need beefier hardware as well as my instance grows, even if I’m the only user. Would love to hear about your experience.

Do you remember where you heard it? I have been looking around for info about this feature

This seems like a really big problem to me. I tried searching lemmy for it, but have not found anything conclusive.

I found a post or two claiming that the issue is that the API is implemented using websockets only, so it’s not as simple as just turning it off. I really hope that is not the case, since I currently can’t read anything on the frontpage that takes more than a few seconds!