As much as I understand beehaw admin has every right to defedorate with any instance, and I respect and appreciate beehaw admins looking after the community.

However, it seems this instance is no longer for me. I want to see more content by more people. There needs to be a balance of content quantity vs content quality. I personally think that beehaw is leaning too much towards quality for my personal liking.

Besides /e/ os, I would also recommend graphene and calyxos.

Calyxos works similar to /e/os in that it uses microg to get things working, but calyxos is more up-to-date and secure.

Graphene os uses sandboxed Google play, which sounds bad, but the play services is confined to its sandbox, basically graphene os will simply feed it garbage telemetry unless it is absolutely necessary for the system to function.

/e/ os supports more devices (not just pixel like the other two), have their own SSO cloud service based on Nextcloud, and they support device that is outside of the support period of manufacturer (this also hurts security, as firmware cannot be updated without the OEM supporting the phone). But there is always a trade-off between security and longevity, given that most OEM only support a phone for couple of years now.

I think you just search the community name, if it is on your instance it will show up as community name otherwise it will show up as <community name>@<instance name> like gaming@lemmy.ml.

But in your instance or not, it will not make a difference for your experience, all you need to do is click subscribe, and it will show up in your feed.

Apple has repeatedly given in to Chinese government's invasive policies, despite all their marketing on "privacy"; because China is a huge market for them. As much as I hate google for most of their practices, they have the basic decency to volunteeringly leave China when their regulations is against the company value.