This seems like your standard open core/dual licensing, CLA controlled BS where open source is indeed treated like an inconvenience… Perhaps with more obfuscation than on average. Probably not really adding requirements on top of AGPL as such but they seem to be offering multiple releases under a more restrictive license either because they have the rights so they can do dual licensing or they keep certain components proprietary and don’t offer those with the team/community editions.

So yeah, probably within their legal rights and I assume there is still a codebase/release that you can use under the terms of the AGPL but they do seem to be looking for ways to make it be used as little as possible.

I could be wrong if the AGPL and other open source parts aren’t enough for actually compiling a functional version of this but this is what it mostly looks like to me.

which conditions on top of AGPL are they adding?

Hopefully it won’t be like Nokia and Stephen Elop.

Well there’s software that can make it easier. Just an option. For ZFS specifically there’s zfs_autobackup which I’ve got experience with and I haven’t tried this but just found out about a Web UI that works with it: https://github.com/natankeddem/bale

Modern filesystems like ZFS have snapshots and the ability to incrementally copy those around even over the network. I’d suggest considering using those instead of something that operates on top of the filesystem.

You don’t because everything here’s based on communities while Mastodon is on individual users. If you’d like something that does both in a single platform I think Mbin would be the best bet (although you can interact with Lemmy communities using Mastodon and other microblogging platforms to some extent)

Another vote for NeoDB. It’s been very useful for me and more people on fedi need to know about it.