I don’t have an answer for you, but maybe you and your friends could get together and start your own? The beauty of the fediverse and all that.

Login issue reportedly fixed with 0.18.2 update: Lemmy.world updated to 0.18.2

I’m a boomer and I’m here. Although I’m probably the exception since I’ve never had a Facebook account and you couldn’t pay me enough to touch anything Meta. Probably because I fit the rest of OP’s criteria: way over 30, tech worker, Linux user.

As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It’s the way federation works, it’s not something that can be forced on people.

This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:

As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.