Is there a tipping point where it’s a net loss? If I understand the protocols correctly, the whole back end federation part of the equation is push based, so if everyone was running their own instance, lemmy.ml would have to push every post to every individual instance in the network. At some point isn’t it more efficient to only have to serve posts when people come here to look at them?

You have to make a new account unfortunately.

Your “hard currency” is inherently deflationary. This may seem good to you since it means your dollar is worth more tomorrow than it is today, but the same is true for everyone else’s dollars too. The net result is to discourage spending across the entire economy and that leads to much worst outcomes. There is a good reason that central banks aim for a small amount of inflation rather than zero or negative inflation.

I would argue that “viewable from” is a far cry from truly federated. The fact that I have to subscribe to infinitely many individual communities to see all, say, “Technology” content across all of lemmy seems like a near-fatal flaw to me.