Yes. That or use Google Cache. They almost never show a paywall to the Google bot because that would hurt their page rank.

Happens for me too.

Not that I know of. Lemmy is part of the fediverse and you can follow/post to Lemmy communities on Mastodon but AFAIK Lemmy doesn't have a system to follow other users. I think Kbin does.

You can follow any Mastodon account as an RSS feed so that would be two in one.

There are also instances made to host spam bots (when they host it themselves they can make as many bots as they want and as fast as they want without having to worry about captcha) and instead of blocking each bot manually, our admins have the option to block that bot instance entirely. That's a pretty powerful moderation tool. They may of course also use this to block communities with a different ideology than them to avoid conflict. If you don't want this, you can join an instance that doesn't do this (that choice is the cool thing about the fediverse) and you could even host your own instance if you have the know how.

The problem is the lack of diversity. Google controls Chromium and almost all browsers are Chromium based so Google controlls the supported web features of almost all browsers, giving them the power to decide which web features are supported on the internet and which aren't. They use this for example to push their own file formats for the web instead of better alternatlives. Remember when everyone was mad that ublock origin wouldn't work on Chromium browsers anymore? Same thing. They get money from ads so they make it harder to block them. Google shouldn't have that much power over the web.

OP here asks the opposite question

Me too and I don't think it'll be a threat to Lemmy but on Mastodon, there are a lot of old people who already use Meta platforms themselves.

They will very soon have the largest userbase of any instance. If your instance gets blocked by Meta, your users suddenly have a fraction of the reach because no Meta people can see your posts anymore. That would put a lot of pressure on admins I imagine.

Yes, that's my reason for still having it too. All my friends are on there. And getting them to change platform is almost as hard as getting a woman to like you.

No, it is pretty funny

It's just their excuse to make you use their shitty app