Happy to help. One further point of clarification: Netbird traditionally was a VPN solution that required client software on the end user device, that’s what you were thinking of presumably. However they recently-ish expanded into offering reverse proxy services as well: https://docs.netbird.io/manage/reverse-proxy

So if you are looking for a cloudflare tunnels alternative and don’t want to go the fully selfhosted route, then Netbird can do that. I can’t speak to it’s reliability though, because I run a selfhosted Pangolin for my setup, and Netbird themselves mention that the feature is currently still in beta.

That’s what pangolin is. Your users don’t need to use anything special. The VPN is used internally to connect your server and the VPS. It’s not actually public facing. For the enduser it’s the same as if you used cloudflare tunnels.

One word of warning if you choose to go with Cloudflare: Using their tunnels for streaming video is technically against their TOS. It’s not really enforced most of the time, but you might run into problems, if you plan on really high usage.

An alternative service is Netbird. Open Source, based in Germany and as far as I know they don’t have this limitation

It’s not a problem if you’re into

• (leftist) US politics
• Linux and other IT topics
• Star Trek
• German Memes

As soon as you try to talk anybody else, you might find you struggle to have a community large enough to sustain a conversation

Nice to see (some of) my taxes going to improving the Fediverse.

The Sovereign Tech Agency (previously Sovereign Tech Fund) is an organisation set up by the German government to fund critical open source projects. Mastodon receiving funds therefore means that the German government considers the Fediverse critical infrastructure.

For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.

The paradoxical situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.

No it’s not. Matrix isn’t part of the Fediverse. It doesn’t use ActivityPub and there is no interop with any other Fediverse service.

That doesn’t make Matrix bad, it just makes it it’s own thing.

6. Your server is your algorithm. That’s what the local feed is for. If you pick a server that caters to your interest, then the local feed becomes a potent discovery tool. That’s even more true for non-English communities because English language content is probably going to drown out everything else on the all/global feed

Or if you live in the EU you can just install the “PAL” version which works without a PC connection.

They will if tHiNkInG oF the ChiLdReN threatens to meaningfully affect their bottom line

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)