I'm pretty sure Automod still needs some fine-tuning, as I also found myself recently caught by it for making a post with a bunch of community links in !general@lemmy.world, which I happen to moderate. 😅
It was resolved quickly and I understood why it may have flagged it (lots of links! that's sus!), but that was enough of a tell to me that it's still being worked on. Your experience also suggests as much I think. Due to the nature of it I wouldn't expect too much clarity since they don't want to enable evading it, but hopefully they at least drop by to be like, "Yeah sorry, still a work-in-progress."
Edit:
Regarding the second post, that wasn't automod, that was one of us in General Discussion. Sorry about that, probably would have been better to point you here and lock it rather than remove it. I'll talk to them about that for future reference.
Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.
However, at the time, there really weren't all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it's been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn't last long).
Now it's kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It's unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.
I’ve made plenty of attempts to “get into” Mastodon and can confidently say that’s a miserable experience across the board if you aren’t willing to do the work to curate your feed.
I honestly feel like this is applicable to any social media, federated or not, and could arguably even be extended to socializing in general, in terms of choosing one's friends wisely. Technological or otherwise, navigating society is neither easy nor smooth sailing.
Although this is by no means to dismiss your experience, only to chip in with my own across different social media and otherwise. Finding one's place among others, curating/filtering one's connections, has always felt like a struggle to me no matter where I've found myself.
Replied to someone else with a similar comment a moment ago, but I'll reiterate here: if you want to post about your hobbies/hobby activities here either to gauge interest in making a community or until the existing communities get more traction, feel free to.
This is an in-between community as-is, so I think it's as good a place as any to find likeminded people to build and grow other, more focused communities.
I recognize it's not the same, but you might try posting some D&D related stuff in the games communities that are open to tabletop games. Also looking into it again, I remembered there's ttrpg.network as a whole, and !rpg@ttrpg.network in particular for tabletop RPGs, and !dndnext@ttrpg.network for D&D 5th edition specifically.
With /c/RPG it at least appears there's some engagement when people post, albeit admittedly the last post was a couple days ago (as of this comment).
Edit:
Me being a dense pattern of neural activity: you can try to find your peers in this community as well. My mind went straight to the larger specific interest communities as I'm thinking you may find others more easily there.
However, feel free to make a thread or threads here to try to find likeminded folks until you can get smaller communities going. Whether as simple as, "hey anyone else into D&D" or say cross-posting from a smaller community to here of things like organizing games or whathaveyou.
This isn't strictly to D&D btw, it includes other hobbyists trying to gauge interest in forming, or grow existing, communities. Basically feel free to post (or cross post) about your hobbies here, whatever you may have recently done related to them, and see if anyone else is also into your hobby and if you all might want to make a community of your own (if one doesn't exist yet).
[...] the group’s agenda and politics were inconsistent with Georgia’s conservative values.
In other words, supporting open access to a broad range of varied information is against their conservative values. Not that that's news to anyone following conservative behaviors, but it must be emphasized for those that don't.
Alongside that, undercutting a source of funds may not be banning books, but it absolutely reduces the operational capacities of libraries that were benefiting from them, in effect removing a range of books the libraries might otherwise provide.
Improved 2-factor authentication, which will disable it for those using it, so you'll want to reenable it after the upgrade. I think in turn this may sign people out, so be sure you still have your login info around, and if things are acting kinda odd, maybe clear your cache.
Instance blocking via user settings, so if there's an instance you don't enjoy seeing communities from, you can block them. This does not block all users from said instance.
Import/export account settings, which includes your bio & various settings like show/hide bot accounts/NSFW content, default sort settings, etc., subbed communities, saved posts/comments, and blocked users/communities/instances.
[...] but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.
Yeah, we'll have to see if/when they fully enable third parties to run their own indexers and app views to see how committed they are to all this, and even then as the thread you linked indicates, there would remain many questionable architectural problems to AuthTransfer.
It is meant to be General in a global/world sense, not strictly US. It simply happens that many of the people posting and commenting seem to be from the US, going off their posts and comments.
I'd encourage people from anywhere to post here if they'd like, as that would help mitigate the US-centric vibes.
can they weye?