free software doesn’t necessarily mean federating with other services.

They have stated their reasons why they don’t wanna do it. You might disagree with them or not. But the technology they built is still open. Anybody could take what they created and use it as a foundation that does federate.

At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven’t encountered any major bugs yet.

The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can’t wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao