I'm far from home on vacation, so I can't answer precisely, but yeah, I followed the official tutorial. Can't remember the error though, but I'm close to making it work. It just gets stuck for whatever reason. Maybe that's because I use qBbittorent in a docker container, don't know.
So yes, I use the manual search when I need something very specific, which I'd rather do from qbit.
Otherwise, I use all the *arr suite for my audiovisual needs. Pretty nice and painless.
Open-source and unmoderated are 2 very different things.
Lemmy is open source so you got this already.
As for an instance without an admin, there can't be such a thing. An instance has to be hosted on some server and this server belongs to somebody that has to maintain it.
A community without a mod doesn't exist, as a community has to be founded by someone to exist.
Now, do you really want a community without an active mod ? Well if you want spam, bots and shitty content, sure.
If your problem is power tripping mods, just leave the communities with such mods.
Or you can run your own Lemmy instance and see how it goes.
YouTube is making millions off the back of creators. They're not helping them apart from giving them some level of visibility in the unfair jungle that the algorithm is.
A form a subscription to your favorite creator on a platform like LBRY, Odyssey Odysee, Peertube goes directly to the creators without feeding the awful beast that google already is.
The problem is visibility. YouTube owns the monopoly of popular videos, and if we want alternatives to work, we need to support independent creators by tipping them, spreading the word and boycotting google.
For anyone interested in a quick look, this is what they found.
Awesome