Migrated to Debian 11 from Ubuntu 6 months ago. Loving it.
With Ubuntu I used to stick to the LTS releases and wait for a .1 upgrade. But I've been running a Debian 12 VM in anger (ie actually doing work on it - I needed PHP 8) for the last month or two and it's been faultless for me. Might break the habit and upgrade the main machine early :)
Edit: almost pulled the trigger a little early tonight. Ironically the one package I have that doesn't seem to exist for 12 yet is Virtualbox - not something I could install & test in my Debian 12 VM...
As the manual says you should run
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
before upgrading to check what non-Debian packages you have installed.
Maybe a possible help here is Lemmy's federated nature? I wonder if it works like Mastodon.
If a certain instance is obviously the source of a significant proportion of the troglodytes then I wonder if their users can be blacklisted from a single community (maybe mod tools could do it??) or if their entire instance would have to be cut off from everywhere else.