Most likely the entire HBO streaming service wouldn’t have taken off, because they offered little to no avenues to consume their content to an increasingly no-cable subscription generation. It’s entirely likely that HBO would’ve died out along with traditional TV.
My understanding from the beehaw defed is that more surgical moderation tools just don’t exist right now (and likely won’t for awhile unless the two Lemmy devs get some major help). Admins only really have a singular nuclear option to deal with other instances that aren’t able to tackle the bot problem.
Personally I don’t see defederating as a bad thing. People and instances are working through who they want to be in their social network. The well managed servers will eventually rise to the top with the bot infested and draconian ones eventually falling into irrelevance.
As a user this will result in some growing pains since Lemmy currently doesn’t offer a way to migrate your account. Personally I already have 3 Lemmy accounts. A good app front end that minimizes the friction from account switching would greatly help these growing pains.
Have to setup port forwarding to make it available outside your network.
I tried running it off my main PC for awhile, but it’s kind of a pain and impacted my gaming sessions. Moved it onto a $400 Lenovo server I got off eBay to great effect. Used unRAID to setup a simple server for it. Lots and lots of guides out there for it with a great community. Have since upgraded beyond that server, but it was a great start.