I use the name Seedling or Seedling Games on the Internet to talk about tabletop RPGs and other related creative things.
Sometimes I make things as well, you can find my website here: https://seedlinggames.com/
ha, if it turns out anything like mastodon, it’ll be the medium to small instances that have the biggest amount of defederation drama. This whole thing is the most amicable defederation I’ve ever seen.
Small instances have otherwise been good for mastodon though
We’ve had a lot of success with that model on mastodon, as well as the sort of hub-and-spoke model where you have a larger instance (like beehaw) and a number of smaller instances that primarily interact with the larger instance and with each other. Location specific instances are also great for discussion, for telling people about events in their area, etc.
You could always start pretty small - basically if you could get enough people who want to have a Tuscon-specific community and who can be active, you could start a solid community, and probably survive off of relatively small donations at first. Once you’ve got a solid seed community it could be easier to grow from there.
I personally run (with a friend) a mastodon instance which is only for me and people we know IRL. While it’s not what you want in the long term, it could be a good starting place while you figure out how to get everything set up and figure out how many resources you’ll need and what funding you’d need. That way you don’t have to solve every problem at once - you can open it up more once you’re sure you have a solid foundation.
I think you can ignore the “pending” thing.
I did just learn that if you’re the first one on your server to subscribe to a community, you’ll only see new posts from that point forward and not old ones
Itch is great, I’ll second that recommendation. It also has some really indie stuff you can’t find anywhere else. I think it’s DRM free in the way GOG is, in that the platform doesn’t support DRM. A good number of games are free, and some are open source as well.
Also it has tabletop RPGs!
That’s basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don’t do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.
Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.
Ultimately if you don’t want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.
Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.