I understand concerns about fragmentation, but recently, I have been more and more in favour of “why not both” as an approach. Basically: One de-facto “central” community, and many local communities. Main reason being, that this will help the Fediverse grow without losing it’s “soul” so to speak. Where - hopefully eventually - there will be those central communities with a reddit-like experience for the topic, and then also local ones, where smaller communities around the topic, without the traps of large, “mainstream” communites, can form.

Basically: Resident enfranchisement. It’s weird, when people born in our country and having lived here their whole life can’t vote outside of local elections. My own father, for example, had a Dutch background, and was never allowed to vote in federal elections until his death. (Neither he nor I even spoke/speak a single phrase of Dutch)

Yes, things have gotten somewhat better and easier with applications for citizenship, but that there are hurdles like that to begin with, is a bit… weird.

Don’t choose Germany, though, we (and a lot of nations, actually) still for some reason have citizenship-by-blood/heritage laws more or less straight out of the 19th century, not citizenship-by-birthplace laws.

Funnily enough, I had never gotten one on my old account which was >4 years old on .ml - but after I made this one on my own instance, in less than a day, I finally got one.

Sadly, as I’m not from the US, it would not really help me (in fact, make it harder). Funnily enough, Iceland was actually occupied by the US during World War II - which they did pre-emptively, worrying the Nazis may pull off another stunt like with Norway and endanger shipping from there if they don’t.

God damn, if I had the money, I’d escape to Iceland. Has been a dream for a long time now, but it just gets more and more desirable.

I see you talk about EU regulations in your instance. Is it hosted in the EU? If that’s the case, I’d love to join it! :D

Yupp, hosted in Finland over a German provider (Hetzner)

By now: Yeah, there are some nice creators on PeerTube. Overall, it feels a bit more like old YouTube, many more people just creating because they want to, instead of chasing fame, as well as bizarre and weird little videos here and there. One advantage of it: It has much better native embedding into Lemmy (at least on newer versions)!

Much like in other fedi-places, it’s work to curate your own feed instead of having algorithms feed you. I have ADHD, so usually, I have some video or something running on my second screen while working on other stuff, and whenever my attention is spent, I switch to there and scour the recent or trending feed (or new vids from subscribers) for something interesting to share and watch.

For anyone interested - I am always happy to plug [email protected] - we recently hit 200 subscribers and have been steadily growing. If you are looking for an instance to join, I am still tinkering with it, but mine is open to new applications for as long as the server resources allow.

I’m currently busy setting up my own Lemmy instance and PeerTube instance. Before the Fediverse, YT and Reddit were basically the only things I used, I was never a big fan of twitter-like social media. So those slot in nicely into those itches to scratch. (although there are still some creators I follow on YT, I have been watching it a lot less after getting serious with PeerTube)

I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.

The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.

And that’s just not bloody true.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

[email protected]

The sauce you get from Sauerbraten is sooooo good, too - goes well with any veggies and/or pasta to eat alongside it.