Asklemmy

probably not, but you'd get the same amount of horrible stuff as you'd get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i'm making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn't block anyone, you're exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don't block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you'd see

It's a fraction of the work of an email server, if you're not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work

depends, If you ignore all the outgoing things, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Your outgoing emails will always go into spam or disappear completely.
If you follow all the outgoing things but ignore the inbound mail checking, you will get quite a bit of spam. I run my own email server and instead of blocking bad incoming emails I just send then to the spam folder. I usually receive about 2-4 spam email a day, usually it's just marketing crap or it's a single link with some cutout of a wikipedia article to avoid spam detectors, and sometimes it's trying to extort you. I find it fun to read them sometimes, one time I got an email saying I missed a payment for my domain name but they got the amount of VAT wrong AND the maths on the subtotal. Some of them are comicality bad. but not quite the flood you might expect. If more people where on my email server or if I signed up to any shitty website I came across I'm sure it would be a lot worse though.

Nah, if you're using your instance as an essentially private one, you're not about to be blocked. If you're running communities on it that run counter to the basic ideals of other communities, you'll probably find yourself losing some federation however.

I run my own, and I'm not blocking anything yet because, honestly, I just won't be vising ones I'm not interested in. I'll probably block a few if I see things coming out of them that I really don't want to see, but at this point it doesn't affect anyone else.

Some decently sized Mastodon instances introduced a policy like this. "Unless you use my blacklist, you are defederated by default". In practice, it means that those few instances are an isolated clique that only talk to each other. In my experience, those cliques are toxic, so it's no big loss if you're not able to contact them. But of course I hope this behavior doesn't come to Lemmy.

I hate linking you to reddit but this post came to mind Choosing an instance; and my issues with lemmygrad

They're just generally annoying. They're tankies, constantly praising Putin and the CCP.

Deny and or support genocide, for one thing

@[email protected] linked one reddit post while I was searching for this one, so here it is anyway:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/13zl7s1/fediversetips_i_do_not_recommend_lemmy_i_have/

And here's the OG mastodon post from fedi.tips:

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

Make sure to "Show More" on each post in the thread, including the replies. I thought it was all spamming the same post for a minute, lol.

By using tools like kbin you are also free to assamble the fediverse you want without the need to follow a single instance only.

Is there an app version of that?

If you're a single user or a small group, a small home server works perfectly well. The requirements are pretty low.

I think each instance has a copy of the posts and comments.
For example this post in my instance is https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/post/834
But the original one is https://lemmy.one/post/22814
And then in the instance the community is hosted is https://lemmy.ml/post/1159362

You can see the ids are different, so if lemmy.one goes down each instance already has a copy (except the images).
What will probably fail are the interactions, the original instance won't have the new comments and votes. I'm not sure how it works after it comes back online.