Sims is pretty popular and the main version everyone plays is PC only, but can be run on laptops and other low end PCs. There are a lot of ‘I only play Sims’ people out there. Could account for some of the numbers

Have to setup port forwarding to make it available outside your network.

I tried running it off my main PC for awhile, but it’s kind of a pain and impacted my gaming sessions. Moved it onto a $400 Lenovo server I got off eBay to great effect. Used unRAID to setup a simple server for it. Lots and lots of guides out there for it with a great community. Have since upgraded beyond that server, but it was a great start.

Most likely the entire HBO streaming service wouldn’t have taken off, because they offered little to no avenues to consume their content to an increasingly no-cable subscription generation. It’s entirely likely that HBO would’ve died out along with traditional TV.

Same. I signed up for the first instance someone mentioned positively. Seems fine, only about 5 minutes of research invested

I honestly don’t know how anyone manages without one these days. How would you even keep track of it all? Even if you go the ‘same password for everything’ route of horrible security, different websites have different requirements for both username and password. Wouldn’t be able keep it all straight at all.

I personally use 1password, which is better than Lastpass for sure. Probably not as good as Bitwarden, but I’m too lazy to switch a second time.

A big hurdle of AI is the fact that they really can’t ‘learn’, at least not like humans can, where we filter out bad data or go back and correct previous assumptions (not that we do this perfectly). Seems like anyone who’s able to truly figure out how to teach AI without needing super-clean data sets will have basically unlocked something pretty close to the singularity. Which makes me assume that we’re honestly no where close to figuring that out and that sample collapse is much more likely (with possibly the internet as a whole being effectively ruined, same as voice calls have been effectively ruined by rampant spam).

The concept you’re looking for is called the ‘missing middle’. People assume the only two options are single family home suburbs or inner city mega apartments.

What’s missing are small mixed areas (which are illegal to build in most of the US) that have single family homes, duplexes, small apartment buildings, all mixed in with commercial spaces like grocery stores and restaurants.

I’m thinking when you hit subscribe, it presents a box of other communities that the community owner suggests as the same topic. Then I can also subscribe to those at the same time if I want.

If I run a D&D community I could suggest D&D 5E community as well and a TTRPG community too. Or also another D&D community from a different instance.

Less about structure and more about easing end user friction to get to content

I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don’t think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I’ll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won’t really care. I also won’t really care which community I’m posting to (except to ensure I’m following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.

This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don’t like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly ‘own’ the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.