You should try pangolin. It uses Traefik instead of Caddy under the hood but it automates approximately 80 % of setup. It’s what I use for my setup.

https://fossorial.io/

https://join.piefed.social/try/ says they are hosted in Europe. I assume they are using Cloudflare only for DDos-protection?

For a lot of people it’s not even “going back”. They are either to young to have experienced the old web or did but bounced of it. There is a sizeable group of people out there, who went online for the first time not despite facebooks privacy invasive profile building but because of it.

Lemmys default web UI doesn’t have a endlessly loading newsfeed. That’s a intentional design decision to help users spend less time on the platform. Because spending to much time on social media is bad for your mental health. So having friction points is a good thing.

Except the competition doesn’t do that. So what is your average social media addict to do when they hit a friction point? They won’t close the browser. Instead they will go back to the commercial platforms.

Some people like junk food. But creating addictive social media yourself isn’t a good option either

There are “servers” on Matrix. They are called communities

Here is the relevant part of the documentation for that: https://matrix.org/docs/communities/getting-started/

For marketplace there is a project in development. It’s called Flohmarkt. Not quite ready yet for primetime but worth keeping an eye on

https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt

tl,dr: it’s a Pixelfed instance by and for native people in Latin America

There is another downside. The local and global feeds are potent discovery tools. But they only work if you group people with similar interests onto the same instance. Your proposal assumes a certain amount of homogeneity. If everyone is interested in the same content anyway then yes you can distribute it randomly. But all the people interested in Linux memes are already here. If we are to expand our reach we need to have instances catering to other interests.

And it also doesn’t work with international communities. German speakers for example go to feddit.org, precisely because that’s where German content is going to be amplified via the local feed and therefore easier to discover (for people an that particular instance)