They should've made the company into a worker owned cooperative, but they prioritized personal profit.
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO's (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn't have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn't switch.
"Oh, it's too small, my niche communities aren't there"
"The UI isn't as nice"
"The mod tools aren't as good"
Etc.
All I can think of is a TED talk I saw where the speaker had given some presentation to a bunch of billionaires and had some q&a, and one of them who had built a bunker for themselves asked him how they could prevent their security team from turning on them in the bunker.
The TED talk guy responded "Be kind to them?"
And the Billionaire said "But where does that end?"
I'll try to find it so I can link it.
EDIT: Found it!
I've always pronounced it Ass-key
Trump, picking a Fox news host to run the military
"How could this be any worse?"
That motherfucker: takes off shirt
Narrator: "It got worse."
it is as batshit as it appears.
But for us at least, it is quite sinister as well, since Trump it quite literally attempting to instill himself as a dictator to avoid prison, and this is being facilitated by white nationalists, religious zealots, tech billionaires, and an easily decieved under-educated populace that are acting against their own interests.
Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.
Quite happy about all of that. :)
TL:DW, JPEG is getting old in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.
However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.
JPEG is getting ~~old~~ long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.
However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google's decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.
Please be aware, Odysee was recently purchased by a Crypto company that also acquired an NFT company.
For more info, see my comment here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/9749921
I would not recommend investing any time or money into the platform, as it will inevitably crash and burn as the owners walk away flush with cash while everyone else is left holding the bag.
Peertube is not ideal, but it is currently the only alternative that isn't tied to a shady crypto scheme.

We need a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren't in a union, then please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we finally manage to enact one (the UAW is planning one for May 1st 2028, but it could happen sooner)
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.