Not really. I like federation in general, but Lemmy would honestly be just as useful and a lot simpler if it was regular self-hostable forum/link aggregator software.

However, I imagine most of the donors and extra attention Lemmy has gotten have to do with the fact that it’s federated.

Doesn’t give you what you’re looking for, but I grab almost everything from soulseek nowadays since I got tired of tools like deemix because you have to know if the album you’re looking for has any edits or removed tracks on streaming to avoid getting butchered versions. Occasionally I’ll buy a record from bandcamp or get a copy on wax, but not usually unless I’m already a fan.

The drive with my collection died recently, so I’ve been raiding the hell out of slsk.

You’d be better off using soulseek or something unless you can only find the thing you’re looking for on youtube (which does happen sometimes).

I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.