And it’s extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you’re a member of one of their ‘blessed’ federated friends.

Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.

The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.

And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.

He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.

Speaking of open signups, is there any organized community on Lemmy that highlights when they’re available (especially, in my case, for audiobooks)?

I guess it depends on the tracker. The only private tracker I ever used was actually for arcade and video game ROMs (PleasureDome), and they structured things so that their most popular torrents (MAME sets) were free to leech but contributed to the upload side of ratio (so you could download the entire thing for ‘free’, but that download didn’t count against your ratio requirement, and you could build ratio by seeding it). It generally worked - at least most of the time, but unless you had a seedbox, a VPN with port forwarding or exposed ports for BitTorrent, you weren’t likely to build up much ratio on other torrents.

I don’t use torrents much anymore (I’m pretty much in the Usenet camp these days), but I wouldn’t really do it seriously unless I paid for a seedbox.

File storage, mainly. I have 2 NAS devices (one Synology I picked up in 2014, and an Unraid device I just built a couple months ago) - the former holds 13TB and the latter currently holds 35TB with plans to bring it to 100TB as I get money for more drives.

The Unraid system has a Youtube-dl instance running to auto-pull videos from the channels I follow, and I also run my Plex server from it. The Synology only has a Git server on it that I use to keep local copies of repos that I store on GitHub, along with personal projects that I’d rather not publish (even as private repos) in the cloud.

It works, at least. The only issue I’m seeing is that if I try to follow ‘sublemmies’ (or whatever the Lemmy equivalent for a subreddit is called) from certain other federated servers, they just sit in ‘subscribe pending’. A fediverse that creates a lot of friction when spreading out beyond your local instance is a bit of a bummer.