While this is great, it only works for self-hosted blogs when your service provider allows access to the Webfinger endpoint. If not, you can try petitioning your provider to open it up but they may not want to do that. It's really frustrating.
I’m still holding out hope that it gets better as it goes along but you’re absolutely correct about the new reboot. It’s fallen into the same trap as The Simpsons where it’s “pick a trend and make fun of it” show after show.
I'm a member of a couple of hobby-specific forums that are still doing okay and I think there is still some life left for them. The nice part is they tend to attract subject matter experts who will answer questions from newbies without the nastiness you see on StackExchange. The small number of users and the lack of public visibility keeps a lot of trolls away. But there aren't many left. Lots of them moved to groups on Facebook or other venues where the owner no longer has to manage their own server. When they do that sometimes their archives get lost, which sucks since who knows how long social media sites will keep things or whether they'll surrender the data for someone else to archive.
It's like there's a contest to see which site can do the most awful fucking thing possible to their users and Reddit is prepared to do whatever it takes to win.
I've been a Mac guy since 1985 but I've always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.
That's what I've experienced as well. My home feed is stagnant and r/all has lots of subs I've never seen. I spend much less time there and I've stopped upvoting anything. I dropped Premium in June since it's clear /u/spez doesn't need the money anymore now that 3rd party apps aren't sucking him dry.
While this is great, it only works for self-hosted blogs when your service provider allows access to the Webfinger endpoint. If not, you can try petitioning your provider to open it up but they may not want to do that. It's really frustrating.