LibreELEC with a FLIRC dongle and a cheapo infrared remote. If you have any bluetooth console controllers laying around, you can use those too so long as they have good Linux support. There’s Kodi addons for popular streaming services and LibreELEC also offers an SFTP addon in case you want a local media server setup instead.

I see some things never change. Been having that same experience since at least 10 years ago.

The way that the ActivityPub protocol (this is the protocol that makes the Fediverse function) works is that it only pushes out content to instances that explicitly request it (a user follows another user/channel/community/etc, or the instance uses a relay), so the spread does matter and the ecosystem is kinda stuck with that until the underlying protocol is changed. I’d agree that a different protocol could remedy this, but realistically speaking I don’t see AP getting swapped out for something else anytime soon.

Well, it’s moreso that decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. Even if the UI/UX were more polished, IDK why they would prefer to use the Fediverse over significantly larger centralized services that basically cater to their use-case. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.

Professional content creators probably aren’t going to like the Fediverse in general since the design inherently limits their reach and there’s just fundamentally less money in it for them. I don’t think it works as a profession in its current form here.

It’s when you connect two unrelated platforms. If PeerTube had a YouTube bridge it would be able to play YouTube content directly on all of its instances without people having to re-upload anything.