Yeah, it’s made more for refining and confirming details than for adding entirely new objects.
When I want to add something that’s not on the map yet, I either add a note in StreetComplete and come back to it later on my computer, or I add it using Vespucci. (I’ve been known to add items using Vespucci, then reload the data on StreetComplete so I can fill in details that aren’t in the presets and that I can’t remember how to tag manually!)
Hmm, a quick look at the html on the logged-out view of a post with lots of comments shows no sign of a meta robots tag, so the pages are technically crawlable. this one
But it looks like only about 25 comments out of 439 are in the html on that first page view, so probably only those will be picked up by a crawl?
If my instance closes down, will I lose control over all of the copied content from my previous account
Once the old instance is gone, yes. If it fails suddenly and never comes back up, there's not much that can be done about that, unfortunately.
If the old server closes up shop in a planned way, and the admins give you enough advance notice, you can take whatever steps you want before the shutdown.
I'm not sure if Lemmy has this feature, but some servers (Mastodon, off the top of my head) have a "self-destruct" mode to send out delete notices during a planned shutdown. It's not a 100% guarantee that all the other copies will go away, but neither is deleting a random post from an active server!
And while you can't directly transfer the history (the debate over how/whether to do this has gone on for literally years), you can export an archive you can keep locally, and there are tools out there to parse it and convert it to some other form (static website, whatever). Someone's probably written an importer by now, though I'd have to look.
If you use a Nextcloud server, there's a good collection of apps (some official, some third-party) that work with it. The ones I use:
Nextcloud - main app, does authentication, file access, optional auto-upload photos Nextcloud Notes - kind of like Google Keep, but simpler. (IIRC Carnet is more like Keep, and also open) Nextcloud Talk - instant messaging, supposedly can do voice but I've never used it for that Nextcloud News - RSS reader that syncs your feeds and read/unread through your Nextcloud server
Plus these apps that aren't Nextcloud-specific, but work with it and other sync methods:
OpenTasks - ToDo list (needs Dav5x to sync) DAVx5 - Syncs contacts, calendars and to-do items between any CalDav, CardDav or WebDav servers and your Android system, so you can access them with any local contacts or calendar app. (For instance: K-9 Mail can use contacts from my Google account and my Nextcloud account, and Simple Calendar can do the same with my calendars.) Floccus - Bookmarks manager that can sync across multiple desktop browsers and the mobile app, using any of several sync options including Nextcloud
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.