I think they switched to usually using bing results last year. Their support site mentions they use both backends. I’d guess which one you get depends on which API is cheaper for each country.

New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

There’s also sepiasearch.org for PeerTube videos.

There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/

There’s Anki which is one of the most popular flashcard apps. Kiwix is pretty great for having tons of offline content from websites like Wikipedia, StackExchange, and Khan Academy, but I’ve run into a few bugs with it. I believe the current version isn’t on F-Droid but they plan to remove the non-free build tools in the next version. There’s the translation dictionary QuickDic. There’s some language specific apps like Der Die Das and Starke Verben for learning German, Kakugo, Fun with Kanji, and Kanji Dojo for Japanese. There’s several language specific dictionaries like Nani?, Nheengaré and a PReVo. For learning numbers/time there’s the Nanji clock widget that can show the printed time in several languages.

About 20k are probably from hexbear, which migrated from their own distant fork of lemmy to the current version, so now they show up in a lot of trackers. They still haven’t enabled federation yet though.