I don’t know if there ever was a similar initiative with xmpp?
Google used to run a standard compliant XMPP server with easily 10-100 times as many users as matrix.org, and that turned out to be really bad for the open XMPP federation after they decided to break federation for business reasons. The same is likely if not inevitable with Element since they are a for-profit company with lots of Venture Capital investment.
There is a room search engine for XMPP: https://search.jabber.network/
But to be honest, XMPP (contrary to Matrix) doesn’t try very hard to replace IRC. Its much more used for 1:1 and private encrypted group-chats similar to WhatsApp/Signal etc. And joining IRC channels is so seamless from XMPP that the IRC users don’t even notice (also contrary to Matrix).
You might want to give the updated Gajim another try then. The GUI was significantly improved not long ago: https://gajim.org/screenshots/
I think this is something similar https://stablehorde.net/
Speculating here, but it sounds like the offending post got reported by some overzealous fedizen, but then the admin had a short look at the post timeline of this person and decided it was neither worth keeping the account nor worth discussing with them. Stuff like that happens sometimes 🤷♂️
And this kind of complaining in a blog post kinda proves the admin might have been correct in their quick assessment.
Move your account to an instance that blocks lemmygrad.ml
There are plenty of instances that do that due to the low quality posts and comments from lemmygrad.
This is the natural evolution of the Qatar Slave Helmet aka WakeCap.
As nice as Nextcloud is overall, I recently decided to move to something without so much NIH syndrome and less enterprise fluff features.
Currently I think KaraDAV with an alternative Filestash front-end might be the best option. Both are quite lightweight, you can still use the Nextcloud apps, and Filestash has nice integration for Org-mode and OnlyOffice. Photo-albums in Filestash also look quite nice.
Indeed the up and down voting is basically a way to crowd-source the curation that other platforms try to do algorithmically. It doesn’t work that well on Lemmy due to the lack of users and resulting easy vote brigading, but at least theoretically it could serve a similar role.
P.S.: cats & anime would be also leading topics on Twitter if they would not artificially shape the trending topics towards “news”.
Sadly most Android tablets are too locked down to allow this.
There are however two upcomming Linux tablets that look very promising: the FydeTab Duo and the PineTab2. Not really budget options though I guess.