The issues that lemmy solves

Oh, I'm not saying the issues it solves aren't important, I'm saying it's focusing on the wrong goals.

What I want out of lemmy is a credible Reddit alternative (so link aggregator with comments), that will be around long term with minimal disruption. It succeeds as a link aggregator, I'm worried about longevity based on its design.

Lemmy also had a goal of being on ActivityPub. Link aggregators (I assume) have a ton more shared data than something like Mastodon. But I don't know for sure, I haven't hosted either, it's just a hunch. Likewise, people already complained about having to deal with a ton of instances on Mastodon, which seems to be an adoption issue for new users. Those aren't solveable with lemmy as designed since they're quirks of federation, but it was probably a faster way to get something out.

I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments... together with a rought member and post count

Ok, that's pretty reasonable. I'm not sure how syncing those statistics would go without subscribing, but it's probably not a ton of work.

But isn't that essentially what [Lemmy Explorer] (https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemmy.world/communities) is for? You get all of that info, and can narrow by instance if you want, even if your instance doesn't federate with it.

Not sure if it was you, but there's an issue for it with generally positive responses. I agree with Nutomic's concern that this could be a lot of data (world alone has >10k communities), but as another user mentioned, we could filter by active communities and drastically reduce that.

The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else

That's pretty vague IMO.

I'm here because I want Reddit, but Reddit made some choices I strongly disagree with, such as:

• effectively closing its API, which killed my favorite apps
• selling user data (more recent)
• "new Reddit," which harvests more data than before; also, new Reddit isn't open source AFAIK
• sacking mods and probably replacing them with AI

I honestly don't care about federation or ActivityPub, I'm just here because it replaces a service I like but refuse to use. Maybe that's what you mean by agency, but for me personally, I'd just not use any social media if lemmy didn't exist (or maybe I'd go back to hacker news).

So that's the lens I'm seeing things through. I see Lemmy as a temporary stopgap, and I'd really rather not invest a bunch of time into something I think needs to be replaced. But I do believe in cleaning up my corner of the world, so I'll contribute here and there, and I hope to donate to my instance once they accept donations (I've asked).

Maybe we should connect on github or something

Perhaps. I'll save this comment so I can come back later if interested. I'm not in a position to really commit to anything right now, but perhaps starting a Matrix channel for like-minded people would be interesting.

I'd much rather keep discussions in some publicly accessible medium than over DMs, so hopefully someone else can pick up the torch when you or I inevitably lose interest.

That said, once I have a working project, I'll post it on a few relevant communities for review (probably under an alt). So you'll at least hopefully see that. I work primarily in Rust and plan to build my MVP with Tauri and Iroh, but I'm fairly comfortable in a variety of languages (Python and Typescript at my day job, lots of years with Go, looking into Haskell because FP rox and I want to study SimpleX chat).

If you want help on a project, post about it and I'll take a look. I'm comfortable with most fullstack stuff (databases, React, Docker, etc).