I watch a ton of videos there, literally hours every single day and basically all my recommendations are about stuff I'm interested in.
The algorithm's goal is to get you addicted to Youtube. It has already succeeded. For the rest of us who watch one video a day, if at all, it employs more heavy-handed strategies.
This one is probably either small enough to fly under Disney's radar or has already been shut down. Disney successfully copyrighted one Club Penguin revival project for using the art assets and logo, even though the code was completely rewritten. Maybe this is the one?
Using Piped/Invidious/NewPipe/insert your preferred alternative frontend or patched client here (Youtube legal threats are empty, these are still operational) helps even more to show you only the content you have opted in to.
There is either no chance of that getting off the ground or the project you are talking about has already shut down. The Club Penguin IP is owned by Disney who aggressively copystrikes Club Penguin revivals.
I like anything that pulls users away from big instances and onto smaller ones. Guys, it's not a DECENTRALIZED system if you're all centralizing on one massive instance.
You're right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I'm going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement
The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.
does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don't get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it's not going to be us, but our children's and grandchildren's generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won't even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won't be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.
It absolutely feels like getting robbed.
Instances can be scaled across several machines. Here they're using multiple containers as their resource usage isn't high enough to require multiple machines yet, but it proves that it can be done.
Definitely consider self-hosting for file sharing, because public file sharing sites without restrictive file size and auto-delete limits get abused and shut down constantly. 0x0.st (mentioned in another comment in this thread) used to host files indefinitely but switched to a temporary system because of abuse, so anyone who used it as their file host will now have a mass of broken links. Unfortunately, none of the self-hostable file sharing options with thumbnail previews that I'm aware of support image albums which was the most useful feature of Imgur.
It's great that they're going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don't miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse's "anyone can post there" system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, "one login to access everything" systems.
The article or the thread? The article is just a list of who's demanding payment from Twitter and how much Twitter owes each company. The thread explains why Twitter has a confusing system of multiple offices and a brand new expensive building (that they are not paying rent on).
USB-A is one-sided, unlike USB-C, so you can't do direct data transfers between two devices with USB-A ports. It's much slower too. Electronic waste is not ideal but it has to happen for a large-scale hardware upgrade. I try to reduce it by recycling my USB-A bricks and cables.
I also cannot understand why, unless you use Apple devices exclusively, you would be happy that one company's series of devices has to use a completely unique charging system from every other device in the world. I don't care if Lightning is better when it's proprietary. If Apple "sticks two fingers up" and doesn't integrate USB-C charging into the iPhone 15, I won't be buying another device from them, because I'm tired of having to carry two different cables around - one USB-C for my laptop, Android phone, power bank, speaker and other devices, and one Lightning charger for nothing else but the damn iPhone.
Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it's annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.
Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it's not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that's just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.
People who don't care about tech don't think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don't consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.