I also have hints here https://youtu.be/T5rBc_T8x2g

This is cool, seems to work pretty well, and an easy way to find communities you want to subscribe to

Well it has to show new posts and give them a chance to be voted on, so maybe it's fine?

you're right about people making choices, but I still think the word choice matters, I've told people about Lemmy before and they always ask what an instance is

One would be tagging communities based on the content in them so these subscribe lists dont have to be constantly manually updated and instead can be set on a community level.

eh instances don't have this either and yet you associate instances with these tags, I think a hardcoded list is fine and it doesn't need to be anywhere near complete or perfectly up to date, just a starting point or suggestions

Did you check your maximum remote streaming quality? 720p 2mbps is the default for that setting, put it up to maximum or original (the name varies between different versions/ports of Plex)

what happens when you clear pictrs? you mean just deleting the folder? does that break stuff?

for comparison, my instance is only communities and no users (FAQ here: https://programming.dev/post/442419 )

it's about 5 days old but not much activity

# du -h --max-depth=2 ./
73M     ./volumes/postgres
7.8M    ./volumes/pictrs
8.0K    ./volumes/lemmy-ui
81M     ./volumes
81M     ./

the latest backup is only 7.4 MB zipped, I use this backup script

#! /bin/bash
# https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html#a-sample-backup-script
now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%S")

cd ~/lemmy && (docker-compose exec -T postgres pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy 1> dump.sql 2> dump.errors)
cd ~/lemmy && zip -r9 ~/bak-lemmy-$now.zip ./ --exclude "volumes/postgres/*"
rm -f ~/lemmy/dump.sql

like I said though, not much activity

and here's how my backup zip files have grown in size over time

6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-08_21.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_00.00.02.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_03.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_06.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_09.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_12.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_15.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_18.00.01.zip
6.6M bak-lemmy-2023-07-09_21.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_00.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_03.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_06.00.01.zip
6.7M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_09.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_12.00.01.zip
6.8M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_15.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_18.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-10_21.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_00.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_03.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_06.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_09.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_12.00.01.zip
7.0M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_15.00.01.zip
7.4M bak-lemmy-2023-07-11_18.00.01.zip

This is what I did with some communities, I created my own instance to group them together

https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities

https://programming.dev/post/442419

It's part of the context menu on each post/comment in the community, there's an option to appoint them as mod

So you gotta make a post or comment before you can become a moderator

I believe this has been fixed in 0.18.1

I wonder how stuff like this would affect the scalability of the fediverse, I think having 1 instance like you describe would be good, but having many of them could become an issue maybe

I think it's literally blocking a misconfigured domain name, like at one point their config might've had the domain name specified as "https://midwest.social" when it should be just "midwest.social"

since federation by default is allow-all, any bugs like that should be fixed so we don't have to manually block all the bad config values possible, or imagine if an instance was maliciously using invalid config values