It was also painful to use Lemmy back then because any time there was a new post it would push all the old ones down the screen and you’d often literally have to chase the links that you wanted to click. That on top of how generally slow and unreliable the platform was back in June. The technical improvements to Lemmy over the last few weeks have been absolutely amazing.
And the servers all* communicate with each other, so you can see content from one server while logged into another (the URL format would just be slightly different.)
Well, except for the cases where a server admin decides to defederate from another server for one reason or another.
I don't stream myself so I can't speak for that side of things, but just for watching streams the software seems fine but there's not much content. Same story as a lot of Fediverse systems.
Maybe once the Lemmy/kbin threaded Fediverse takes off (which I think has the potential to be the first federated network to eclipse its centralized counterparts) there can be some synergy with these other platforms that can help them get more users.
The Fediverse is decentralized. The individual instances are not. Decentralization means that there's no one person or organization with power over the entire network, but people absolutely can and should moderate their own instances. If you don't like the moderation policies of once instance you can move to another.