The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.

First, I don’t like calling proprietary software “official”. Proprietary software is just software with closed source code. What makes something official is someone deciding “OK, this is what we are going to use” or that it definitely came from a particular source. Getting Docker directly from Docker repositories rather from a distributions repository for example.

My general take is if FOSS can do the job, I use FOSS. If FOSS can’t do the job I need, then I will go with the best proprietary solution to my problem. If I go with FOSS, I tend to prefer using the repository of the project in question rather than my distributions repository. The projects repository tends to be more up to date and there are fewer opportunities for ba actors to play with the code. Downside is that these repositories may introduce changes that may bork your OS when/if you upgrade to a newer major version. FlatPacks and AppImages help to mitigate this.

Hope that helps.

Well, first thing, you should read “allow list” as “federate ONLY with these instances”. Block list is the opposite of that, “DO NOT federate with this instance “.

Try removing everything from your allow and block lists and see what happens.

From my vantage point, things in the US are much as they have been since roughly October, 11th 2001: SNAFU.

Consider the following:

• For the last 30 years, we as a nation have tried all we could to force every child into college, resulting in insufficient numbers of tradesmen/women, huge debt loads on people who are unable to find work that pays sufficiently to pay off that debt, and are all too frequently no smarter than they would have been had they not attended collage. Simply more sure of themselves.
• We have, for the last 20 years engaged in mid-scale expeditionary warfare, to no known profit, resulting in large numbers of returning combat veterans, who, do to a skills mismatch, largely seem to have ended up in police and armed security, increasing the average aggressiveness of these forces.
• Despite the large numbers of collage graduates, there are an insufficient number of doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals at a time when they are needed.
• Due in part to a lack of tradesmen/women, we now face a housing shortage, resulting a significant increase of homeless people who have good paying jobs, but are unable afford a roof over their heads.
• An increase in general fear in the general population has led to an escalation in gun ownership, increased violence, and the increased militarization of police forces, creating a feedback loop.
• The gap between the wealthy and the poor has been expanding at an exponential pace. Put another way, The poor get poorer, the rich are getting richer, and the middle class is shrinking.
• Average pay over the last 80 years has not kept pace with inflation. In the 1980’s, an average truck driver made $135,000 (inflation adjusted) while in 2022 the average driver made roughly $55,000. The same has occurred through out the rest of the economy, though not quite to such an extreme.
• A loud minority of the American population is attempting to force their religious beliefs upon the rest of the population, most of whom do not share the same moral framework.
• We have now had a President who has, in my opinion, actively incited an insurrection against the US Constitution and continues to do so.

I now face a decision on whether to vote for a series of political candidates whose policies may result in the destruction of my nation in 10 years. Or a series of political candidates whose policies may destroy the nation in 100 years. Some choice.

As far as I know, there isn’t an account migration mechanism in Lemmy yet. I’ve heard (fourth hand at best) that it is in the works but hasn’t been implemented yet. You may have to do it the hard way. Copy, paste and search.