I don't have a space for a garden so I spent a lot of time this spring going out and looking at the wildflowers
This was from about a month and a half ago. I never get tired of California Poppies
I think you can ignore the "pending" thing.
I did just learn that if you're the first one on your server to subscribe to a community, you'll only see new posts from that point forward and not old ones
Itch is great, I'll second that recommendation. It also has some really indie stuff you can't find anywhere else. I think it's DRM free in the way GOG is, in that the platform doesn't support DRM. A good number of games are free, and some are open source as well.
Also it has tabletop RPGs!
there are some, but they tend to quickly become spam and nazi instances. I'm guessing even those ones defederate from the instances that only serve malware though
I really like Mastodon, so much so that I have several accounts for different purposes. You do need to invest a bit of time into following a good number of people who post stuff you like, though. I was pretty active on Twitter and now I'm pretty active on Mastodon and I like Mastodon better, but I had to spend a little time searching hashtags for people posting cool stuff.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention is moderation - your experience will be better with a well-moderated, well-run server, otherwise you'll have issues with spam and maybe worse. Generally a medium-sized server based around a subject of interest or a geographic location works well, where the admins are actively involved in the community.
That's basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don't do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.
Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.
Ultimately if you don't want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.
Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.