It's a staple but hardly the pinnacle.

More or less. The site owners have some discretion about which instances they federate (that is, exchange content feeds) with, so you may not get absolutely everything. And some of the connections seem more reliable than others - I've found that the Lemmy sites reliably share posts and comments with each other, and they seem to receive the stuff from kbin, but I've noticed some comments on Lemmy don't seem to show up on kbin.

They seem to be worried that the Lemmy developers' politics will influence how they design the software - for example, making moderation tools that favour certain powerful users. But rather than abandon Lemmy entirely, why not fork the code?

I've been happy with the Pixel 6 Pro, which is still going strong with good battery life and continuing software updates after almost two years. Much nicer UI than the Samsungs I have had. The only thing I don't like is that it's Google spying on my entire life.