Could be a multitude of reasons. Some people just really enjoy sysadmin work, some maybe want to play around with the software. Places like Beehaw have a goal of creating what they consider to be an open and welcoming community. Some even have nefarious reasons for hosting (luckily we have defederation).

Logins are returning non found errors. It’s a bug. If you had a previous session that’s as already logged in, you should be able to access it.

You should be prompted when opening after updating to the latest version.

I’ve found from hopping around some other instances that have upgraded to 0.18 that it is still pretty buggy. It does seem to be giving more information about the errors, instead of just failing like in 0.17, but spend any time browsing on those instances and you’re bound to be inundated with JSON and query errors. It also seems to get worse the longer you browse.

The UI changes are nice, and I do appreciate not having my feed auto-updating constantly, but I think you’d be making the right choice to hold off on upgrading until they can iron 0.18.1 out all the way. I’m not super knowledgeable about TS and Rust, but as a user it seems that switching from WebSocket created/shined a light on Lemmy’s issues with caching in general.

0.18 is where they have swapped WebSocket for HTTP, as well as tried to fix a load of bugs related to using WebSockets (like the new posts pushing the main feeds down).

0.18.1 is meant to re-enable CAPTCHA on signups, which was removed in 0.18.

Bell icon at the top right. Should bring up your inbox which holds your replies and messages.

I set a link in my profile to All/Hot/Page 0 for Lemmy.world, following the link seems to work in the PWA. You could put page 0 links for the different filters as well. Crude workaround, but it works!

The fediverse directly helps with that exact problem by allowing actual instances to remain small as needed. There’s no requirement that an instance have millions of users, which is what drives up cost. Personal instances can still participate in all other federated instances’ communities.

Mastodon has been a good Guinea pig for proof positive the model can work, with something like 4 million+ active users.

You have it right, just have to give it a few seconds when you start typing and you should get a drop-down list of options to pick which auto fills the link for you.

The refresh is, I think, supposed to be a feature of Lemmy. Basically the feed would be updated with new rankings as posts’ rankings change. However, I think it’s bugged out since the huge influx of users and supposedly the devs are working to replace the protocol used to do the update and make it not so jarring.