I have a very slight feeling Reddit’s working for China, and not for the US. If I’m right, then chances only grow since the pushes for identity verification gained traction around last September.

For Misskey-powered instances, there’s also Nijimiss.moe from the bigger ones I know about. It appears to either house or federate a lot of Japanese users too, from what I could observe. And dunno your Mbin instance, but on mine, I can follow Misskey.io and Nijimiss.moe users just fine, just taking a little while to populate the /all page (but surely happening since Japanese folks seem to interact between one another a lot), and at worse on federation to Mbin with some formatting issues for posts since Misskey feels a bit like its own thing.

But alas, on the flagship (?) instance, I know a guy that was able to create an account when he/she lived for a while in Japan, and when the person went to another country, access to the site remained.

Per-instance rules, communities, cultures, technical limits, etc., could make it less friendly, which I presume is what the OP is asking about.

About formatting concerns, since you’re on Lemmy, before posting, there’s a view button near the bottom of the post form. Main reason I return to my Lemmy alt. =)

About your issue, not an US citizen myself so can’t check details as easily, but considering what I can tell from the outside, I’d suggest first seeing if laws for your specific town, county or state, or even the federal ones, make Google adoption opt-in or opt-out. That also could require confirming with an attorney to be safe, which would likely cost money.

enhancements

Shoehorned as is, with Google involved with Mozilla, and considering linguistic usage, feels damage control or even manipulative wording. Furthermore, “feature” would be far more neutral, while the word choice could even imply “we know better than you what’s best for you”.

Apparently FFXII and FFXIV 1.0 both are heavily inspired on the FFXI formula, so perhaps FFXII is the closest to what the OP is asking.

Some cheap JBL cable earphone I bought some 5 years ago, and that in recent months even had an adventure in a centrifuge washing machine. It’s working pretty well, barely picking any background noise, and listening is not migraine-inducing despite imo lacking a strong bass channel.

The problem, however, is that such reasoning of the State taking the initiative happens too frequently in several parts of the world, e.g. for ID scans that have been gaining traction since October from what I can gather. As when a coincidence happens too often, chances are it isn’t a coincidence, such news rise a red flag to me.

Don’t cats wag the tail when they’re annoyed? 😶

On topic, video of a Cuban family visiting a Brazilian market for the first time (video not in English):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASx4oHVgzus

Again “think of the children”. Besides how many laws and “pragmatic precedents” use that as an excuse, shouldn’t the parents moderate what their children do online, and not the State?

Oh, right, non-fediverse forums may be a good call too.

From the top of my head, for example, GOG’s general forum has an old but ongoing thread of fanmade cover arts for games (link).

Or, though lacking the familarity since I don’t frequent there as often, the Fuwanovel forum might be a good call too since they’re focused on visual novels, a game-like medium where art usually matters a lot.

I can think of a few methods that could be integrated together, but no single silver bullet / database / etc.

For example, ArtStation, Bluesky, DeviantArt and Old Reddit all have RSS feeds. If the direct image link gets passed on the syndication, you could potentially set your instance to load the image from the link (if it doesn’t automatically) and store it locally. Or maybe even get a robot to download stuff as they’re detected.

Pinterest, though as miserable as it is since over a decade to browse, is a great resource for digital or digitalized images, but requires manual browsing. Possibly you can find a lot of older stuff on social media limbos like Facebook and Discord groups and Instagram profiles too.

A bit closer to a database, Booru projects could be useful, though beware as the bigger instances usually seem to be NSFW. But people that post on Booru sites, from what I can tell, usually seem to include the sources of the images. And though by default manual browsing and cataloguing may be needed, projects like RSS-Bridge should give you syndication so you can check where you’d prefer. Twitter should have quite a few artists too, and the Nitter project offers RSS for it. And dunno how Pixelfed behaves towards Mastodon-like microblogging, but if you can follow such and you can set an RSS Parrot or Friendica instance, you could follow these feeds as users in your private instance.

And back on Instagram, the only 3rd party interface I found that seems to be maintained, though not open source, is https://imginn.com/, in case you want to browse there but don’t have an account or doesn’t want to feed Meta too much information.

If you subscribe to any artists on Patreon, you can download their posts with Patreon-dl GUI. Similarly, if you follow anyone on Pixiv, you can download the images from their posts (just them though, and not the whole posts) with Px Downloader.

If you find an image without source and/or in a poor quality, you can also look for the original using SauceNAO and extensions like Search by Image.

Also there are several artists and art-oriented groups in the fediverse too. At least on Mastodon-aligned platforms, which are the ones I have experience with, you can follow individual users, as well (at least specific to Mastodon) as tags, whose Lemmy/PieFed community handles before the @ get passed as tags there (e.g. posts from here and the community you cross-posted on get passed respectively with the tags #art and #opensource).

Can’t think of other specific cases for now, though I hope it helps!

If yours feel like a stable/balanced setup, maybe find another project? From my experience, without majorly reconfiguring the machine, virtual machines, RSS and making your own programs can be rather time-consuming, though also carrying a challenge you may be lacking as is now.

IP leak means your real IP is exposed even with VPN on.

Nothing a duct tape and a bit of electric engineering can’t solve, eh? 😬

@one_old_coder@piefed.social Another angle of the same point, if the person likes indie or metal songs, specially western ones, it’s an absolute trove from what I can observe.

Sacre bleu!

As an analyst from my country proposes, depending on how the situation is dealt with, the next step would be a “stag-inflation”, when inflation freezes for a while. Then, if the issue is left to grow, there are cases of deflation, but because people are in full contingency. And as manufactures lose notion of cost and demand, they stop producing as much, shrinking the already shrinking stocks, and making people go on a rush to stock up, resulting in hyper-inflation.

But I suspect this issue is just a cover up for the world’s general impoverishment/inflation from the past few decades, AIs being an useful scapegoat.