As far as I know it was started by the original lemmy developers which made the software because they felt persecuted for their beliefs on normie social media. Lemmy just happened to be around when the reddit CEO decided to f up reddit so everyone started using it despite the creators not being well adjusted people.
Edit: just so I'm not misinforming here's what they said themselves about the origin https://lemmy.ml/post/70319
I don't get how extremist leftist content ends up attracting people who are against woke stuff in stardew really but over time I've gotten the vibe the ml and hexbear people are in general more combative and angry about things.
There's different kinds of backups. For this you don't need off-site storage.
For this I set up zfs auto snapshotting which means when I delete stuff it isn't really deleted because a snapshot is still pointing at it until it rolls off the time window.
Both zfs and btrfs can do this but you do need to change the filesystem to use these which can be a lot of work.