A lot of the “less active ones” are completely dead. Many mid-tier topics (not niche, but not “meme shitpost”) have a sea of dead communities and 1-2 active ones and it’s difficult to find them without actually clicking through the full list of results.

Doesn’t this also connect to Mastodon?

Also funny how every instance seems to have furry/anime motifs. Nothing wrong with that, I am a big fan of some 80s/90s and early 2000s anime, just thought it’s funny. :)

Then why partake in ML?

lemmy.ml is predominantly socialist.

Saying ML is socialist (which it’s not, it’s a tankie instance) is de facto discrediting socialism.

It’s like saying that socialists oppose any criticism of russia and china (authoritarian, imperialist, hyper-capitalist oligarchic countries that have nothing to do with socialism) and socialist only read Russia Today.

Sh.itjust.works is fine if you want to join a mid-sized instance.

I personally find DB0 to be a bit suspect (they tolerate and sometimes enable tankies).

This what I was trying to setup when I first started (with Nginx, domain and free tier version of Google Cloud). I wasn’t able to get it all running with Nginx and HTTPS.

I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.

In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.

For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).

I would suggest looking into DietPi, it’s IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.

For that kind of money, I would expect the SSD drive to be able to provide some other qualities beyond technical things like capacity/bandwidth/latency.

Some very good qualities.

Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.

Have you used Piefed and its multi-community comment system? I am asking because from using it, I don’t the impression of “being migrated to one dominant website culture”.

Looks like some pretty solid improvements (I use piefed on a different account).

Looking forward to checking out the image upload functionality and the UI/UX improvements.

Post urls are now “friendly” since they include the community name and a snippet of the title instead of just a number

It’s good that the old style links aren’t broken.

This one of the great features of Piefed!

But then you have the question of what do you define as critical mass and which specialized instances to exclude.

Don’t get me wrong, I support your idea and I generally think an instance should always be pre-selected for a new user (with an option to pick your own). Some of it should definitely be based on geo/regional factors.

Threadi is too small for that, if it had 2 million MAUs (50% English / 50 % other langues), what you are proposing would be semi-viable.

Between Lemmy / Piefed / Mbin, we have something like ~50 K MAUs tops.

That preamble is quiet the something.

I would recommend deleting your current posts, writing a brief intro (300 words tops) that also links to a FAQ and the full text of your concept.

It’s impossible to read in its current state.

Any more info on this?

From reading their FAQ if seems like an ActivityPub implementation for Micro-blogging but with other features and integration with other Fedi networks (sort of like mbin?).

A quick scan of their main public instance shows higher than average amount of far right content, but not overwhelmingy so (and the examples were from other servers, not clear if its Pleroma instances or smaller mastodon servers that get blocked on major instances).

What am I missing?

AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).

And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.

Don’t know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It’s been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.

One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a “quality per GB basis” (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).

We have a war on, so probably not the best destination right now.

I would prefer if they were not based in the US, both for jurisdiction reasons and cultural reasons (no offense to sane Americans).

No, I said ADL is not to be trusted, there are clear reasons for this.

They deny the Armenian genocide because it’s convenient for them.