MxRemy

That's where I'm at, nice place!

I'm not sure about overall activity, but I do know my feed is active enough that i can't read ALL of it unless I spend like an hour or more per day on here, and that's plenty active for me.

Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There's lots of good reasons to want to do this... Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.

EXCEPT... It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it's own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.

A cursory internet search isn't turning up anything about this, but I'm pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.

Means TV

Pretty much just Battle Craze, I'm hooked on it lol.

The soundtrack to Boyfriend Dungeon is OUTSTANDING, I will never stop listening to it.

I migrated to the flagship PieFed instance a while ago and haven't regretted it at all. This place rocks! I would love it if there was an app though, not a big fan of PWAs lol. If I was smarter, I'd try to make one myself. Very exciting to see more instances popping up!

I assumed, by "They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.", that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn't realize their instances were already closed-registration.

Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.

I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.

I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?

Mirlo.space is working on federation too. I think they're not as far along in that regard, but further along in terms of being a bandcamp replacement? Last I heard, anyway. I buy stuff from there, payment works.

A lot of public libraries offer access to ReferenceUSA through your library card. I vaguely remember that queries are pretty customizable on there, and exportable to various formats. Despite the generic name, it's specifically for businesses. Would that work?

Oh geez that's tricky... My first instinct is to say Towa Tei's Sunny, the entire album. But the thing is, half of what I love about it is the nostalgia about how much I loved it the first time, and where I was when I listened to it. So maybe it'd be better to pick something you might've liked better under other circumstances? In that case... Hmmm... I'd say the audio drama Spines.