The color screen of e-readers is too dark for me and substantially lacks contrast. It’s very noticable. The layer for pen recognition already makes the screen darker, but the color display is adding a lot more to the darkness and lack of contrast.

There were a handful of reasons I returned mine, but this was the biggest one. Color eink isn’t ready yet, and the limited color palette wasn’t even the worst part… it was the dark screen. Needing to use the backlight so often is just disappointing, and turning it on negates all the good stuff about eink, making you feel like you’re using a really shitty tablet. Maybe things will be better in a generation or two, but if you need color you might as well get a conventional tablet.

All four of the replies to your comment (as of now) are from users on different instances.

I think where we differ is whether Lemmy is pointless without truly distributed communities. I come down on the side of “it’s not pointless” since there’s a huge and growing install-base of mostly* compatible servers, clients and users that means the cost of switching communities is low, and the threat of switching may be enough to keep mods from implementing unpopular policies. More worrying to me is the admin of your home instance, where your identity is located, going rogue, getting hit by a bus, forgetting to pay their hosting bill, etc.

*notwithstanding serious issues like defederation

Silently combining communities, which may each have different content policies, is rife with potential for user confusion. Also, there’s no guarantee that communities with the same name across servers have the same aims — to use your “piracy” example, c/piracy on one instance may be enthusiasts of literally sailing the seas wearing peg-legs and looting ships, or people who have sarcastically adopted the name for their fandom of those Johnny Depp movies, or something else entirely. Or your desired kind of piracy may take place in communities named differently across servers, whether it’s due to someone else registering the community name first, local slang/translation, etc. Ironically, I think what you’re asking for is a different type of centralization — centralization of namespace across servers.

The suggestion is interesting, but you may be expecting something out of Lemmy that it is not, as communities are individually hosted and managed. It does sound like there may be potential for Lemmy instances or client apps to allow a user to combine communities, multireddit-style, for their own personal usage. That would be cool and useful.

Oh no! This is what I get for scrolling all the way to the bottom of the thread…