I can definitely see name-collisions being an issue, where communities on different instances have the same community "ID", but aren't actually about the same thing. I'm still overall in favor of the basic idea though.
true_blue
In my view this isn't the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they'll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don't actually care too much if Reddit dies. I'm happy as long as there's a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
The line between IDE and text editor is kinda blurry nowadays anyway. I don't know that much about Geany, but many of the text editors I've used were basically full IDEs, except that the IDE features were opt-in.
Currently I use VScodium as my editor, and I've been happy with it. I hear a lot of good things about Kate too, and as a KDE user, I feel like I should try it some time. Kate to me looks like the same spirit of text editor as Geany. Maybe if you're comfortable with that style of editor, give it shot.
The 2 editors that have really been catching my eye lately have been Helix and Lapce. I think it's really cool that Helix went with a Kakoune style "selection → action" system instead of the normal vim style "action → selection". I think Lapce is trying to be a similar style of editor to Vscode, with simple IDE features by default, but then an extension sytem to expand that. Maybe an editor like that would be approachable to you. Although unlike Helix, Lapce seems to be less production ready for now, so maybe wait on that.
For now you could of course just try VScode (or VScodium if you're like me and want open-source software) since that's a popular one right now.
That's what I've been trying to do myself. I'm really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I'm almost always a lurker, but I'm really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!
I'm really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It's a really cool idea!
Exciting! I've been keeping my eye on this space of immutable Linux distros. It seems like there's gonna be a lot of changes here.
For anyone who's interested in an alternative, check out https://codidact.com . It's much smaller right now, but it's open-source and the community is nice.
A suggestion I've seen is to add reddit.com to your ublock origin "my filters" page. It works great for me!
I haven't decided if I'll actually go through with it, but as a learning experience, I've been thinking about making little rewrites of some command line utilities (and maybe some original ones if I get any ideas) that output NestedText, instead of normal unstructured text. NestedText looks like a really cool data format. It's basically exactly what I wished Yaml was, and the reference implementation is in Python so maybe it could be fun. Plus it'd give me a reason to try out the really cool looking Typer library.
I have an account, but I don't really use it much. Not because I don't like it, but because I don't have much to say really. I'm more of the lurker type.
The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The "main" homeserver is matrix.org, but it's recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there's no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.
The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of "reference implementation" so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io
There's some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don't have to worry about those much at first.
DNF. It's slow definitely but it has a lot of really cool features, and the output looks nice.
But with the way the Reddit admins are handling the website, you wouldn't have had that sub for much longer anyway. That's the whole point of the blackout in the first place. Don't blame the protesters. Blame the admins. They're the ones with the power to change things.