Is there a way to create an EMP without a nuclear weapon?

There are several other ways, yes.

Virtualizing applications that use 3d graphics can be a pain

Yep, currently using restic with Backblaze B2 via rclone

I’m personally a fan of plaintext accounting tools like ledger and moved to that from GNUCash several years ago after fighting with the DB getting corrupted repeatedly. There are a few tools for importing from GNUCash as well as many tools for interacting with the ledger on mobile devices, so perhaps worth looking into.

Yet in the same posts they insult people who don’t have the same opinion as them.

I’m betting it’s the use of the phrase “objectively easier” when that is incorrect by argument of geometry. The “objectively” riles people up.

There is a reason why forklifts have rear-wheel steering (and therefore behave much like an automobile driving in reverse): having the point of rotation towards the direction of motion allows for much more precise maneuvering, much like you would need to do in a larger vehicle trying to fit into a tight parking space.

Okay, so how do you bootstrap a new server in that system?

What do you do when you just created a server and can’t get new users because you aren’t whitelisted yet?

But what if you do handful of users to start out, or just yourself? How do become ‘active’ without being able to federate with any other servers? Talk with yourself?

Obviously biased, but I’m really concerned this will lead to it becoming infeasible to self-host with working federation and result in further centralization of the network.

Mastodon has a ton more users and I’m not aware of that having to resort to IRC-style federation whitelists.

I’m wondering if this is just another instance of kbin/lemmy moderation tools being insufficient for the task and if that needs to be fixed before considering breaking federation for small/individual instances.