But then again, startups probably aren’t considering the geo-political implication of country TLDs and that in 5-10 years any specific nation might simply stop existing.

Icelandic would like a red-headed word.

I personally am a fan of jet-lagged, the game. Sam, Ben, and Adam from wendover productions/Half as interesting compete in various travel-based games across the world.

Absolutely, I’d personally never use Discord as I’d use Lemmy, but some people sure are trying even if it is very counter-intuitive.

Its not that strange: people use what they are familiar with. Most people have a Discord account these days and migrating over there is as easy as clicking an invite link. In contrast Lemmy is relatively unknown and untested to the general audience, and is a step higher on the hassle scale, even if it is a similar service to Reddit - not counting the usual fediverse complications.

People are drawn to go as far down the hassle scale as possible, the fewer steps between them and their goal the better.

Not that a lot of communities did successfully migrate over here, partially or not. Lemmy is a lot more active now than when I started looking into it during the initial API struggle in June.

Mastodon I’ve found has a bit of a discoverability problem, but there are ways.

1 ) Start off with your local timeline: these are all the people that are on your instance as well. If you’ve chosen a “specialized” instance most of these people will have something in common with you: mastodon.gamedev.place for instance is filled with indie developers, mastodon.art is full of artists, and so on. The more general instances like mastodon.social have a lot more activity, but there’s no implicit link between people on it. It’s a trade-off: the more specialized of an instance you’re on the easier it is to find people like you and build a tight community, but the smaller the instance. The more general the instance is the more activity and people are on there, but less of it is relevant to you.

2 ) Go search up some hashtags of topics you like. For instance if you like baking go see what’s on #baking. If you’re interested in pictures of moss #mosstodon is great fun. If you like pokemon #pokemon, and so on and so forth. You can naturally follow hashtags themselves, but you can also try to use that to find people you may enjoy following - after all, if someone is posting baking pictures and you like baking maybe you’ll enjoy following them!

3 ) Go snoop out other instances. Some Mastodon clients allow you to directly view the local feeds of other instances, but you can always just go straight to the page of said instance. Find a few specialized instances for topics you like, scroll through the local feed for a bit, and follow people that look interesting to you.

4 ) Google: when I joined Mastodon I just googled a few people I like or followed on other platforms and saw if they had a Mastodon. There are also plenty of “Who to follow on Mastodon” articles out there.

5 ) In the “explore” feed you’ll find posts that are trending on your instance: often at times there are some good users there to follow, albeit it can get a bit “samey” if there’s a big news story going on.

Optimally instances should have a tos or privacy statement, but out of the box you can expect a web server to collect your IP (if for nothing but know where to respond to your requests), a log of your requests, and any content you generate in using the instance (comments, votes, posts). login data (email, username, hashed password) are also stored to let you log in at all.

any other data will depend on the instance in question, how it is configured, and who is running it.

I feel that given the current trendyness of AI and large language models it seems prudent to mention Façade, an interactive play that used AI and language processing to let the player “speak” to the characters and influence tha narrative. It was very janky and you could break it rather easily, but the concept was solid - the technology was just a decade and a half away.

start simple. It is all right to just make extremely simple meals while you get in to the habit of cooking on the regular schedule. sit down on Sunday evening and scan the internet for ideas what to cook that week, make a plan, and buy groceries on, say, monday.

It is all right if the plan doesn’t go perfectly, something is better than nothing. Most of it is just practice.