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No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.

Say for example a /c/anarchism gets added to a “politics” feed. And suddenly you have a bunch of people that have no clue (or even a pretty false idea) commenting on posts in the anarchism community because they think it is just another politics posts. Then others that are actual members of that community start getting into largely off-topic arguments with these commenters and when moderators step in you shortly after get complaints from people about being “censored for their totally valid opinion about politics” and so on.

Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.

Once a community is known to an instance it is available via the search feature. Thus this really doesn’t improve discoverability at all assuming the person adding it to the feed is already using the instance.

What it however does is moving the conscious choice of looking for and joining a community to an opaque follow feed button that makes someone subscribe to a lot of communities they know nothing about other than that someone else thought they somehow fit to a single word tag (and it is worse than hashtags on Mastodon as it is not the person making the post that adds them, but a totally unrelated 3rd party).

Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.

Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded “reply guy” issue.

I think most people on Lemmy haven’t really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.

And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don’t agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.

If I don’t misunderstand then you can only add communities to these feeds that are already known to your instance, thus I don’t really see how this solves the federated discoverability issues which are ultimately due to instances not being aware of each other at all.

This will reduce the discourse quality significantly as it will bring in more drive-by comments from people not subscribed to the specific communities in question.

I hope there will be some way for communities to opt-out from this or maybe better require them to opt-in.

Steam is a service, you are not buying and importing a product.

There are some talks in the EU about applying special measures on online services as well, but classic tariffs usually apply to imported goods only.

Steam might be unintentionally affected by such measures, but I think it is more likely to hit big tech and cloud providers.

The title already gives it away 😜

There was a Vietnamese instance for a short while, but it seems like they got scared off with how restrictive their governments internet policy is.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/dean-spade-solidarity-not-charity

Just install Linux on the laptop and start experimenting.

Yunohost is very easy, but something like Debian or Fedora Server Edition will be more flexible.

Charity is not the same as mutual aid anyways, even though I have also seen “mutual aid” requests on the Fediverse that were clearly asking for charity.

Nice PR move, but when do you announce leaving the US, which is the much bigger issue right now?

Xmpp itself works great. The slidge.im bridges are relatively new and your mileage will vary. Matrix, Discord and Telegram works ok, Signal & Facebook messenger have issues right now, WhatsApp is a bit tricky to set up properly.

https://slidge.im/

It basicallly allows you to remote control an existing Matrix account on a remote homeserver. Works quite well.

Matrix servers have the problem of highly variable resource use.

Basically if you only use it for some light chatting with friends and family and some niche topic public rooms it isn’t very heavy.

But if any user of your homeserver joins any busy rooms or uses the bridges to join busy public Telegram channels or such, it will quickly outgrow the resources of a reasonably priced VPS.

Personally I would rather recommend you to set up an xmpp server, which can include a gateway to Matrix and other services, but architecturally is much more lightweight and has better mobile clients.