This describes me.

There’s plenty of cool things in life to enjoy that gets you through hard times that aren’t drugs. I run a lot and exercise for mental health, etc. Never felt the need or desire to alter my perception of reality. Would rather face up to it and deal with things head-on.

Then again, I don’t really know any different. I’ve always been drink and drug free.

I agree that it would be nice if the software was as versatile as possible.

That said, at a certain point it just feels like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and I’ve always seen Beehaw as a little like one of those cases. They want an admin-controlled environment with only communities there that are admin-approved. They only want very specific users to participate under a ruleset that is a lot more restricted than any other instance on the fediverse. They seem uninterested and unwilling to compromise to integrate with the rest of the fediverse at large.

At a certain point, it’s right to question why they’re using a federated platform at all. Their use case really does seem to be best suited to a self-hosted forum, or a whitelist-only Lemmy instance where they don’t federate with anyone by default and can choose to federate with very specific instances that may share their philosophy, or none at all.

My opinion is that Beehaw’s philosophy seems to be fundamentally incompatible with the concept of federation.

You guys want a very specific community that’s heavily moderated to ensure everything within it conforms with the “safe space” environment you wish to preserve. While that’s your prerogative, the reality is that the vast majority of instances, and users on those instances, aren’t going to come anywhere close to your standards, nor do they have any desire to. That means you’re going to be continually fighting fires in terms of the moderation you’ll have to do in order to preserve your community’s ethos.

You guys want a walled garden community. Federation is the complete antithesis to this concept. You’d be better served by forum software, or a completely isolated Lemmy instance. The Fediverse as a whole may be better served by you guys doing this as well, since any major community hosted on Beehaw presently that others in the fediverse enjoy could disappear for everyone on your next whim of which instances you wish to defederate or when you leave entirely.

You’d be doing both yourselves and the wider fediverse a favor by going off and doing your own thing as you seem to want to do, in my opinion. Frankly I’m surprised you’ve not already done this a lot sooner.

LMDE essentially is Debian (uses the Debian repos for most of its installed packages), with some Mint packages included on top via the Mint repositories that are also added. Mint actually has some pretty neat graphical utilities and has Flathub configured to work by default with the Software Center.

The real benefit though is if you enjoy using the Cinnamon DE. The latest Cinnamon version is kept up-to-date in LMDE as the Mint team backport it. The Cinnamon version in Debian 12 is fixed and will not get major version updates until the next version of Debian.

As a Debian user myself, I enjoy Mint when I wish to use Debian on the desktop. I only use core Debian for servers.