https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony

This will take care of the other commenters point about having to manually subscribe to everything. I just had it pull the top 500 communities from the top two instances and I’m fine…

I don’t get how we can block. I long press anything and I get a browser menu…

EDIT: Figured it out!

The problem is you lose the ability to encounter new communities by browsing “All”. And since I’m the only user on my instance I will never discover any communities that I don’t manually add or find on third-party websites not to mention that process of using those websites is cumbersome and tedious…

I added the top few thousand communities and the server runs absolutely fine. :)

Voat was a replica of Reddit in design. One centralized server. We would have ended up in the same crappy place even if that were a success because at some point they would have wanted to monetize it also.

You have to do some reading and learn about the technology behind Lemmy and federation to understand.