In Brazil, there is no alternative :(

For a huge chunk of the internet there isn’t one either. If Visa/Mastercard suddenly decide they don’t want to do business with you anymore, you’re fucked.

Reminder that “self hosting” media is an extra step, you can do the same with “saving media locally and playing it”

Mastodon limits to 500 by default. Alternatives like misskey and pleroma are usually 5k or unlimited

“Nooooo you can’t blame all these work related accidents on capitalism!!! They were isolated cases caused by specific companies!!!” - some dude I debated on Facebook, circa 2014

My dummy understanding is that each instance could be considered a “client”, in the sense that they’re always on the lookout for data from other instances whenever the latter generates new content. Either that or, when one connected user checks what’s on a different instance, it downloads to the local cache, ie: if I, from programming.dev, am the first to check this thread, a copy gets saved locally (cache) in the programming.dev server, which might check back on the original source in the case of any edits.