I still don’t get it. If a r/pics mod goes to lemmy.ml and makes c/pics, I can go to lemmy.ca and make c/pics, and you can go to kbin and make m/pics. You’re right that probably one of those pics communities is going to end up being the favorite but that doesn’t mean the others can’t post good relevant content. Also no one needs to “move communities” you can subscribe to every version of pics that that exists. I’m subscribed to multiple different communities of the same topic because each of them are going to have their own slant or take on the topic. Over time the content and comments will be what determines my favorite of them, not which is the biggest.

On the fediverse I think content is king, much more than anywhere else, simply because there can be so many versions of the same topic. The one that rises to the top will be content based, not based on server or who the owner is. I can create 50 communities, but can I post 50 communities worth of good content and foster 50 communities worth of good comments? I mean, maybe. But probably not.

It’s definitely an interesting selling point. I’ve always said you have to take the good with the bad on social media, but having independent instances who can curate things a bit means you don’t actually have to take the bad if you don’t want. Even though the Beehaw admin themselves said this is essentially a nuke and not how they’d preferred to have handled it (Lemmy doesn’t have the tools just yet to do it any other way) it’s still interesting and unique in social media.

Beehaw is creating an identity for themselves and sticking to it, rather than being a general instance. Some people will love that, some will hate it. But ultimately it’s whats going to make Beehaw a unique place to be for those who want it without taking anything away from those who don’t. This is all still early stages for Lemmy and there are growing pains for sure, but this sort of thing, to me at least, shows the possibilities of a Federated network.

I can’t say that I have. I’ve never used lidarr though so if there is an issue with that I’m not the person to ask.

I find Plex to be pretty bullet proof, and I have family scattered all over the US, and one in Europe, who all use my server and we don’t run into many issues. Very occasionally I’ll get a message something isn’t working and just restarting Plex always seems to fix it. I like self hosting but I’m not any sort of tech wizard. If it took a lot of work to maintain or had a lot of problems with multiple users I’d probably just abandon it, but I’ve been running it for the better part of 15 years now and it’s pretty solid/dummy proof in my experience.

Plexamp has completely replaced streaming services for me. Plex will now sonically scan any music you add and is able to give recommendations through Plexamp for sonically similar tracks, and also use that data to build mixes based on mood and style.

There are all sorts of auto generated mixes that Plexamp will make on it’s own based on the music you have. You can also make a playlist of say, your top 20 tracks and when the playlist ends Plexamp will just start playing songs that match the sonic theme of what you’ve been playing so far. Note that I say sonically similar rather than of a similar genre. I love this because genres are often very subjective, and while Plex does take into account the tags you’ve given things, it also will group songs based on how they actually sound. You can control how many degrees of separation too if you want to keep the theme close to your playlist or just let it wander through your collection.

For me at least, Plexamp is every bit as good as Spotify. My music collection has grown to around 20,000 tracks over the years and it’s pretty easy to get stuck on the same handful of artists. Mixes and auto playlist generation in Plexamp has helped me rediscover music I forgot I even have.