Gotta justify that printer ink budget.

Are your smoke detectors linked to each other? Could be faulty wiring in the circuit, or a completely different smoke detector failing and sending out an alarm that triggers the others. The latter happened in my home when I was growing up: the living room smoke detector kept going off a few seconds before the rest of them would chime in, but it turned out it was the one in the nearest hallway that was failing and sending out bad signals. The living room detector was just the next in the circuit.

90% of the time it’s bigots who are upset that they’re getting deplatformed. The other 10% of the time it’s the incredibly idealistic or naive. Either way it’s a crap argument. You are under no obligation to endure verbal diarrhea, nor is it your responsibility to change the minds of the people spewing it. They shit the bed, they can lie in it.

Lemmy.ml has several solid communities, including the largest AskLemmy community. Their top 20 largest communities are all pretty mainstream and don’t really see the kind of posts/comments that make people wary of Lemmygrad or Hexbear.

OP’s home instance is the second-worst in terms of questionable defederations (the worst being beehaw). I used to have an account on lemmy.world but stopped using it once they blocked anything even remotely Piracy-related for that exact reasoning you’re talking about. Just switched to using this instance and Kbin and problem solved. Worst part was re-subbing to all the communities I’d been following. Pretty painless all things considered.

Defederation has its place but some instances really overuse it.

Depends on what counts as “better”.

Better quality? WAV, since it’s lossless.

Better efficiency? OGG (well, Vorbis) since it compresses pretty well, but you’ll still get a (minor) loss in quality.

That said, both of those formats are old news and should only be used if you have weird, specific compatibility needs. For lossy compression, OGG/Vorbis has been succeeded by Opus; it’s what YouTube uses, compresses fantastically, and is supported by damn near everything. For lossless, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is still the gold standard: you can reduce file sizes by as much as 60% with literally zero loss in quality. If you can, use one of those.

Kbin is a combined implementation of Lemmy and Mastodon that works with both. You can view and post to Lemmy instances via Kbin and vice versa. That said, much like Lemmy it’s still being developed, so there are still bugs and inconsistencies that sometimes cause Kbin and Lemmy/Mastodon to not quite communicate with each other properly.

The one thing I’ve noticed is that Kbin’s federation with blahaj specifically is a bit lagged. Posts only show up after a pretty significant delay, usually about an hour. Also I’ve yet to be able to successfully make a top-level image post from Kbin to any other instance, so that’s annoying.