Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.

This reminds me of the Big Mac decision. I can’t remember where but there was a burger place that had a Big Mac burger but the name was not a copy of the McDonalds one, it was iirc because the owner’s name was Mac. Anyway, they lost the case and therefore lost copyright protection on Big Mac, so Hungry Jacks/Burger King started renaming all their burgers to something something big Mac, just to mess with them. Maybe Apple will bite of more than they can chew and end up losing protection for the Apple logo or similar things.

My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.

If nothing else this is a different way of organising than what has been tried on most other systems. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is other methods have been tried and had outcomes that this team does not want to replicate, so trying a different method makes sense.

I am reminded of the difference between the spirit of the law and letter of the law systems. In letter of the law systems if something is not explicitly illegal it is permissible. It is the duty of the lawmakers to explicitly prohibit the behaviour by creating a prohibition and if they fail to do so correctly then the act is permitted. In spirit of the law systems things a little more interpreted rather than directly read, so if you have an act which fits very well the spirit of the law, being something the law was specifically intended to prohibit or limit, then the law will be interpreted as applying to that behaviour and that case will be used as an interpretation in future for other cases. This is actually what we use in most of the world and does make sense, even though it does mean that sometimes laws exist that are not enforced or some things that are not explicitly prohibited by law are prohibited by case law.

I think in the case of a system that has to change over time this will inevitably happen. Something new happens, people figure out what they will do about it today, then that becomes the rule going forward.

I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.