MentalEdge

Yes and no.

Pending means the sub hasn't gone through to the home instance of the community. If you're the first subscriber, this means the there will be no inbound federation bringing the content from that community to your instance.

If someone else on your instance has already successfully subbed, the federating is already occurring, and your instance will be receiving the activity as it comes in.

Your instance will then show it to you, both in your subscriptions and in general, even though the sub is pending.

If your sub stays pending, you may have to unsub and resub to get it to work. If no-one else on your instance has subbed either, then the activity will continue to not show up for as long as it is pending.

I just checked the docs for installation instructions, it didn't seem to make a distinction anymore.

Great. It wasn't too long ago that MariaDb was still the "recommended" option.

Nextcloud.

Though I think it has some level of support for postgres by now. I should check on that.

How the fuck do you "accelerate" something they are already achieving?

Not sure how much of a future it can have even if you slap on some "speed".

No, I did change it, IIRC I enabled a lot of the ones that weren't by default.

I haven't felt the need to use anything else in months, so I'd say it's very much fit for purpose.

You can always check out one of the instances available for free use to see how it performs.

All of them.

It shows you which ones "agree" on a given entry, so you can tune it to your tastes.

Self-hosted. That's not a typo, it's what it's called. Searxng.

Here's a list of puplic instances to try or use.

I've yet to need one. I dread the day, tbh.

I've been using my own searxng instance for a few months now and my god I'm never going back.

I fully agree. Spotify's payment model has been criticized for years, but they refuse to consider changing it.

AFAIK youtube music works in the way you suggest, where the money from your subscription gets divided up among whoever you listen to.

There are various methods.

Spotify does have a free tier.

But paid accounts can rack up so many plays they can pay for themselves. If you listened to ten tracks, but someone else listened to ten thousand, then your money barely paid for what you listened to, and almost all of it went towards whatever the other user listened to a bunch.

There has also been malware that hijacks legitimate accounts... There's even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.