Riots are very different from protests. Yes the police should be held accountable, but that’s no excuse to go and destroy public libraries and loot businesses. All that does is screw over people and communities who had nothing to do with the incident to begin with.

Element and fluffy chat are probably the best options currently for android. I personally use Element as it reminds me of discord.

I think it will be similar to reddit, where a small percentage of people produce content while the majority lurk. I used to lurk a lot on reddit, but I hope to change that here (I feel it’s important to be active to help drive activity).

I think it depends on the country. In the US, ISPs tend to be fairly strict so using a VPN is necessary (at least with Comcast). After 6-7 DMCAs, I’ve heard of people getting their accounts and service terminated. Best to use one and not take the chance with them. With 3rd world countries, most ISPs don’t care about DMCAs so I can see there not being a need to use one in those situations.

Ah shit, here we go again…

Not a privacy barren wasteland that we seem to be heading towards currently. Governments seem to be taking it into the other direction with how much they are trying to limit digital safeguards. I wouldn’t even be surprised if most places turn into China with regards to censorship levels. The US isn’t too far away either, with legislatures trying to pass bills such as the Restrict Act.

Just wanted to post an update, I was able to fix my issue by disabling Cloudflare and now federation seems to work fine for my instance. I’ll leave this post up in case anybody else runs into my problem in the future.