Use lemmyverse.net to find communities across all instances. It will make you search a lot easier, and show you when a community exists on multiple instances
There are plenty of people that do this, and it seems to be pretty straightforward.
There is a significant risk going forward though- if the undesirables (the ones that currently get larger instances defederated) start doing this in any major way, then the larger instances will block new federation or smaller instances by default. Starting now is actually probably a good move, since you might be grandfathered in when that occurs.
Also, be aware of local laws regarding content you host. You could be liable for illegal content you inadvertantly receive.
It’s true that porn is a big part of the internet at large. You can point to countless examples where a product (even social media) lived and died by porn.
But there are also countless examples where porn was never a factor. Most of the major social platforms today have always had an anti-porn approach. It’s debatable whether that helped or hindered their growth, but it’s always been a thing.
Now, I can’t think of any where porn was a big part of their platform that got removed, and they came out ok. Maybe that’s (part of) why Reddit has been downplaying porn for a while.
Right now, there is plenty of porn in the fediverse. But there will be the same challenges as any user-submitted porn site. There’s currently a big discussion about categories that are unwanted, generally offensive, and illegal in certain jurisdictions. The fediverse makes all of that more complicated. There’s also a big concern about the content being uploaded directly, increasing the load on every instance that federates.
There will definitely be porn here, but I don’t think it’s going to work the same as it did on Reddit.
That’s not really a measure of the codec, but rather a measure of the encoder. A lot of x265 encoders are awful. They go with x265 for the smaller file sizes and over-compress it, similar to the old YIFY. Groups that use x264 already aren’t as concerned with file size (if they were, they’d use x265), and choose settings that optimize for quality.
Thing is, the slow boil technique is tried and true. Each turn of the crank would only anger a small group, and would ensure the platform remains stable and popular.
A better question is why is this happening all at once? It feels like the top brass had a meeting to discuss options to increase revenue, and just decided “Fuck it. Let’s just do them all”
Yes. I still don’t quite understand how moderating works with federation (and critically, defederation). The advice of “Pick an instance that aligns with your values” is the most WTF advice I’ve ever seen when signing up for a site. Even worse is the conflicting advice that it didn’t matter since they all talk to each other, then followed by a warning that you have to choose an instance that will talk to your communities.
As bad as it was, at least the advice of “Go to lemmy.ml and sign up” was simple and direct, and most people could follow that without getting overwhelmed or confused