At least most of that can be turned off in settings somewhere.
Bought a neat closed-loop watercooling cpu heatsink that has a whole dang programmable screen on it if I pay a monthly thing, or solid colors if I don’t. defaults to cycling through the rainbow. But it has an off mode, so I’m A-OK with none of that.
You can go into your account and under two-step, generate a one-time code. Store that code somewhere secure, like a note in your password manager if you trust it with both steps, and you can do it.
Pretty sure Google authenticator will have something equivalent but likely more secure, but haven’t used it.
Yes and no.
Structurally, it’ll remain decentralized, so one clear advantage here is that if the admins of a very large instance start trying something, my current understanding of how this works would let users ignore them. They don’t control account creation, since any federated instance can see everything, so there’s no meaningful way to actually block someone, they can make a new account and the rogue instance has no further powers to stop individuals. They could block whole instances that don’t conform, but unlike Reddit, that doesn’t get rid of them. Instead, it fractures the communities, which hurts everyone. In that case, a user protest wouldn’t be a blackout like Reddit had, it would be a migration to another instance, and if other instances blocked them back, replacement communities would form.
Of course, this is a double-edged sword, it’s harder for Lemmy to permanently end communities of hate and others that deserve permanent bans, as is always the case with decentralized authority, but that’s the tradeoff.
It’s a problem, but a pretty funny one, to me. Mine does the same thing, startup is full rainbow, then it settles.