Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?

There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that’s in the works.

We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?

Someone that’s not spez.

There’s no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can’t fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you’re on gets taken over by assholes, it’s going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you’re on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.

Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they’d either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.

It’s a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren’t assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.

Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn’t have. Does having additional options make a system worse?