First of all, good idea to get help on tackling issues. Second, i still think you might benefit much more from a chat than a forum. A safe space where your opnion does not need to be "well rounded" to be engaged in a respectful manner will do much more good than a public thread. Again, in my opinon.
Well, it depends. Often I see people ask for this who want to take but not give, which can get you banned in the best case and destroys a community in the worst case.
Loneliness often comes from particular experiences like not being able to share good things or rant about bad things.
But that is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is missing connection. There are possible neurological reasons for connections deteriorating (i would know) but if one makes themselves aware of this, they can try to counter this.
If you want to be listened to, related to, helped and understood, you need to do that for others. The rest will mostly come on its own. If that does not come naturally (again, i would know) you have to make an effort to do it.
After that is clear, I would suggest chat groups, not forums as forums are much more loose and dont allow for a deep connection imo. Depending on your personal identity, you can find chats which takes a thing you all share and makes it a topic to connect about. I suppose participating for a month will get you decent connections to share outside experiences with. Again, it needs to be mutual to work.
The question isnt easy to answer as you dont need an instance to participate. It is far better if you join an instance and spare yourself the hassle of admin and/or mod work. If you absoluteky want to have a community which you can build and mod, you can do that on any instance. If you think you can provide something that nobody else can then you could open an instance. But in that case i suggest finding people to do this with because it is a large project.
And only after all those considerations, you should think of the tech aspect. You can get a vps for 10 bucks a month and host lemmy on it, probably amongst other things. But i would probably not do it if youre not really curious about server hosting stuff. Managed hosting (which is the offer you mentioned) is another idea but it isnt worth it imo. Rarely will someone really have the need to use that and then the company provoding needs to make money so you will lose.
I get your point but you're taking the symptom for the disease.
Like every addiction (which this depicts imo), the system around it is the problem. The vast majority of people uses their devices massively to escape the bleak capitalfascist reality for some time.
We also have dismantled nearly all well working alternative systems under the disguise of "freedumb".
You can trace back nearly every problem currently to that source. We need to get rid of it. Then the screen addiction goes too.
Its all capitalism. In germany, people also buy larger and larger suvs and just a couple minutes ago i saw a petition for the EU to limit car soze growth. Its infinitely braindead. You dont need a car the size of a small house. Streets are not your property. I would limit individual cars to the smallest size possible. Driving a car isnt just bad for the environment, it is also a logistical nightmare. Therefore, the benefit of the many trumps the benefit of the few.
It kind of goes together with constructionism. Reality is what you perceive and it is proven to be a little different for every person. Colors are slightly different, sounds are different. So objective reality as such is not really a thing. By that logic writing it down and saying it were objective is kind of illogical.
But still, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. You for example would not be here if books didnt exist. Only through books is programming taught and the devs of lemmy and the fediverse are ample readers afaik.
We need AI hype off of this platform. LLMs and such are only important for science. Everything else is just massive waste of resources which we absolutely dont have and cant spare as a population. We need 100% renewables NOW and we need to stop expanding AI immediately.
The anti lemmy content is still coming. It hasnt been this bad for months. Either the influx of people has really brought some shit in here or the oligarchs have found another free bastion to suffocate in their shitstorms.
In any case, if you are sincere, I can somehow relate as dogpiling is a problem in our society everywhere right now. Even in political left chats, people will say absolutely vile things because our society has degenerated that much.
I have blocked hundreds of accounts on here and i use suggested blocklists on some fedi services since I dont want corporate controlled bot armies to molest my users and me.
The issue with opinions as of right now is that, depending on the place, your possible lack of knowledge can trigger someone who thinks you're doing it on purpose.
Example: someone posted a wholesome story about a japanese trainstation that stayed open for one kid until they graduated. I suggested people to read about the treatment pf children in japan and got banned for it. What I didnt write: japan has a massive child prostitution problem and doesnt seem to do jack shit about it. Of course i also got dogpiled on.
And this is an example of why lemmy is great. You can absolutely isolate a group of people from the outside world and its reality if they want that. But you cant shape the narrative on the whole platform, which makes this place so resilient and important.
I'm pretty sure this will get shat on but here we are, in the place where you can do that if necessary.
I think if money has no value to you anymore (billionaires), you employ a company to sue anyone who collects even trace amounts of your data. Think largest and most expensive law firm calling you as ceo of the data collection agency and asks if the wife knows about his tendencies.
Watch the series revenge to get a somewhat good idea of ultrawealthy life.
"I have an idea to improve it" or even opening an issue with the devs would be the way to do this. Instead you front against something that is, lets face it, tons more private and more free than 99% of the world population give less than half a shit about.
currently, every day people try to cancel either lemmy or the devs while fascists are killing protesters in the US and the whole world tries to get totalitarian capitalist control.
I will be mindfull of my next words to not be ableist myself:
"Regular stupid" is absolutely ableist as well.
People are of different abilities, both physically and mentally. Just because you understand something and they dont does not make them stupid.
What they DO can be stupid, not the person themselves. Same as any other slur, it isnt good practice but people can self deprecate using them but others may not.
Obligatory anarchist comment: you can change that! How awesome is that?! :)