The benefits of federation are vast, and the downsides are temporary, all of your issues are currently working to be solved.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

Federation is just harder to bulid in the first place, that’s why you’re having any problems at all, the devs are ironing out all of this, and there’s going to be better solutions for all of this, you’re at the dawn of the lemmy fediverse, it’s not mature and you shouldn’t expect it to be.

We need federation for our future, if you don’t want a single corporation to control all the content on a website, you should value this, over the minor annoyances that are currently happening (BUT ARE NOT FUNDAMENTAL)

If an instance is federated, competition is automatic, look at what happened to reddit, right? Do you want that to happen again? If not, you should value federation, all of that is completely prevented by lemmy with little to no downsides for the end user (long-term).

Yes, you’re experiencing problems with federation now, but they’re actively working to solve these things, and once they’re solved, you’ll end up with a version of reddit where you’ll never have to worry about anti-user changes being implemented, or even pro corporation propaganda.

It’s more fundamental than just the api thing, reddit is literally designed in a malicious way because it’s goal is to make money off of you, lemmy is not.

You really have to look at the bigger picture here and realize the problems you’re listing are both minor and solveable, and while they are related to federation, the problem isn’t federation, it’s that lemmy isn’t very mature.