Keep in mind that the Fediverse is also a distributed governance model, and it can be seriously harmed if one bad actor gets too much leverage. Meta's business model is to control as much of the users and content as possible, which runs counter to the idea of the Fediverse. They want to use it to bootstrap their new app, but they'll try to superseed it as soon as they have enough leverage to do so.
The thing is, people might not know that they have to look for the Docker setup. Now if they search for "Lemmy on Synology NAS" they land on this guide, telling them to use Docker.
You can update a standard release distribution just fine, no need to reinstall anything. It does basically the same thing as a rolling release, just not as often and more packages at once.
I think being able to migrate your identity from one instance to another is a core requirement to fulfilling the promises of federation. The idea is to be able to freely leave a bad instance, but all you can do now is completely start over on a new instance, losing all your posts and followers. That's way worse, and not how it should be imo. No big instance has gone rogue yet afaik, but as soon as one does this will be a major issue!
To really accomplish that we would have to create a mechanism for a user to own their own identity, e.g. in form of some sort of secret key file. This would introduce a huge number of usability issues though! Handling key files is really hard, so that's probably not an option in the near future.
What we definitely should add is some sort of instance single-sign-on, so you can log into another instance by having your original instance authorize the login attempt. This should then allow the new instance to use your original account (for subs and posts), and also migrate that account to the new instance (update handle on all your posts, migrate your followers, ...). This would be a bit worse than owning your identity, because your original instance could just refuse to authorize any SSO attempts, but it would still be a big improvement imo.
Maybe we can also just combine the two, so instance SSO and being able to download an identity key as backup.
Same. Having all their custom software available and just one click away is amazing, and with Docker you can install everything else just like a regular server. It's the best of both worlds imo.
If you don't have any restrictions (limited subdomains, service only works on the server root etc.) then it's really just a personal preference. I usually try paths first, and switch to subdomains if that doesn't work.
In principal yes, but not at any cost!
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is also a distributed governance model, and it can be seriously harmed if one bad actor gets too much leverage. Meta's business model is to control as much of the users and content as possible, which runs counter to the idea of the Fediverse. They want to use it to bootstrap their new app, but they'll try to superseed it as soon as they have enough leverage to do so.