I’d recommend just buying from smaller and local shops. Instead of going on Amazon and searching for a product, search the product on Google/DDG and see what comes up. Hopefully you’ll get some decent prices from smaller sites or maybe come across a good local shop that you can pay a visit to periodically.
BforBrian
I imagine that is slowly changing now since they've made that announcement. The only thing that was holding most people back from at least giving it a shot was the fact that it wasn't open-source. I personally think it should be included at this point because it is privacy-focused alternative to WhatsApp.
The dominant theory seems to be ease of use/simplicity and the front page of everything having furries, hentai and a bunch of nerd chat.
I think a good way to solve a few of the issues is to have the main instance of each platform market themselves a little harder and not so much on the pods/instances - teach that to the people later after they get in to the atmosphere of the Fediverse. For example, someone goes to Mastodon.social, all they see is that it's the main instance, and other that the word instance, it looks like a simple Twitter alternative.
Then later if they want to delve a little deeper (the customer), they can learn about instances/pods. From there they can host their own, or search for a new one. (Most of the instance directories could use some simplifying too)
Then to go along with that, each main instance would also have to be moderated quite heavily to keep things clean for when people first join.
Thoughts?
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