Welcome to the community. I hope you enjoy your time here, I know I have!

It's also about search engine indexing. It's happening slowly, but I've noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.

I follow a similar philosophy, except I do downvote the mean but not rule breaking content. While it's not bad enough to justify removal, I do still want to discourage people being mean on this platform. For most disagreeable opinions, I'll either move on or reply with my point of view.

I wash my coat from time to time because I consider and have considered it to be part of my wardrobe. For my belt, I suppose I kinda just considered it as an accessory and it never occurred to me to clean it.

If they do both-ways federation (I've heard rumors of it being one-way only) it should theoretically be both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it will work better with Mastodon because they're both for the same purpose (i.e. Twitter-like apps).

Theoretically, something like c/deliciousfood or c/foodpics. I don't have strong feelings on this issue, but there are alternative names that would work.

Not just that, but the code contributed to Lemmy by this debugging will make Lemmy run faster for everyone on every instance, which is makes the ecosystem that much better.

I'm honestly not sure. Reddit's decision making here has been so stupid I'm just guessing their motivations.

I've heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.

Not at all. The admins here are doing great work and their updates are often informative and helpful, it makes sense you'd look forward to them.

The quality of the posts being worse makes sense, I'm guessing some of the Reddit power users moved here and they were generating the majority of quality OC on Reddit.

Because the goal was to ban third party apps and they don't want people trying to dodge it. u/spez seems to be personally offended by their existence and wants them gone.