Most of them didn’t allow registration. Then for the ones I did find, streaming videos was very slow and laggy. In some cases, I couldn’t even view videos. And then, it seemed that I could only search for videos that existed on that particular instance.

As a user, I feel this pain. The defenders of how “easy” it is to join federated services, it really isn’t. There’s choice paralysis as well as waiting for registration and verification. It’s not smooth at all. Take a stop watch and set up a YouTube account, upload a video of a cat’s butt, and it’s like 2 minutes.

As a person who rolled out my own servers, I understand the barriers. I don’t have registration because my $5/month server can’t handle it, performance-wise or spammers. Even uploading things on my server is slow.

Hard problem to solve tbh and I don’t have a solution