I think maintaining mirrors and archives are important. It would be preferable to work with site admins but no one technically needs permission to web scrape so long as you do it respectfully and without causing service interruptions.

Honestly at this point I might go back to 9gag, like I just wanna scroll through funny memes

IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that’s just a rule.

We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you’re looking at.