I have almost always had good luck. Just one bad experience comes to my mind - my host in Germany was a psychopath. I didn’t have any problems with her, in fact I hardly ever met her during a one week stay. But I forgot the heating on when I left. She got so pissed off that she left a long, insulting review, where she said shit about how we never got along. Airbnb refused to delete the review, so I deleted my account. By the way, I don’t pay $200 for a night. I take the cheapest $20 room that I can find.

Anyway, I created a new Airbnb account. The nice thing is that I was able to use a referral link from my wife again to get the referral bonus. So by deleting and recreating my account, I actually made $50.

Still there’s no way around the fact that hosting videos is expensive and someone has to pay for it. It seems like PeerTube mostly contains small private instances where people host their own content. If you find an instance that allows you to upload videos, then it’s up to the administrator to decide what content is allowed. I feel like I can still trust YouTube more that my videos won’t disappear some day. You can of course create your own instance. I don’t know if that would be the way to go then.

Still there’s no way around the fact that hosting videos is expensive and someone has to pay for it. It seems like PeerTube mostly contains small private instances where people host their own content. If you find an instance that allows you to upload videos, then it’s up to the administrator to decide what content is allowed. I feel like I can still trust YouTube more that my videos won’t disappear some day. You can of course create your own instance. I don’t know if that would be the way to go then.

I also use DuckDuckGo by default, but quite often have to resort to Google. What I love from DDG, however, is their email forwarding service. Create a random email alias with the click of a button, when registering to services.

I don’t see how the system would change unless people stop tipping, but as a foreigner I don’t see it as my responsibility to change their system.

Videos

I bought an Internet connection and read from a computer magazine that I’m able to connect to an FTP server for downloading files. (I don’t think I needed it for anything, I was just curious of the new technology.) I remember that when I connected to the server, it displayed instructions that one should use “cd x/y/z” to change to a subdirectory, instead of separate commands “cd x”, “cd y”, “cd z”, to save network bandwidth.

When I did my military service (mandatory in Finland), we were living in tents for a week and the only way to poop was in a bushcraft toilet in the forest. I thought that’s gross and tried to survive the camp without pooping. I think I did five days without pooping. The next night I woke up and had to run out of the tent and use whatever toilet there was.

Imodium

How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?

I agree, animal videos, especially those with a twist. My current favorite is AnimalsBeingDerps.

The thing I’m struggling the most with getting into Fediverse is that I have to create an account on a specific instance. I don’t identify myself as part of a single community. I’m interested in several different topics and active in different communities. I guess it doesn’t matter that much which instance I select, but somehow I have to select one instance.