I think separating them improves the user experience for regular users, which I think counts as a real advantage. As I wrote in the body text:

As-is seeing an indication of a comment for a post only for it to turn out to be a bot is slightly disappointing at best, and mildly confusing at worst when their display has been disabled.

It’s a small detail, but small details add up when it comes to the user experience.

But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don’t think it’s sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption.

Have you considered that while those may be genuine technical issues, addressing those alone won’t in turn help much in building good communities? Imo one of the common problems across all social media is that a lot of smart, capable folks build their backend systems but neglect to bring on community relations teams (or in the context of entire platforms, community governance teams, maybe?) that coordinate with the people that use those systems.

Probably the big reason for this is that thus far large social media platforms have been built with a corporate mindset, and so the people aren’t viewed as people, but an audience for adverts, subscriptions, products, etc. Lemmy has a different yet similar issue insofar as technically capable folks building backend systems, but they don’t (nor others deploying their tech) have the resources to bring on any additional community-facing help to then coordinate and collaborate with people in governing their spaces.

Thanks! Github gets me turned around at times, so really appreciate it!