I could be wrong, but I think it’s mostly a matter of familiarity? If a cis person is familiar enough with the trans experience and struggles, they’re not gonna say anything that’s a problem, because it’ll be obvious.

For some reason I’m picturing them all with little Studio Ghibli style faces?

I enjoy the deranged erotica, partially because it’s good but also because it makes the toxic alpha male/sigma male dudebro types go “no, not like that!”

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?

I definitely agree with some of these for sure. The uncreative decks is a big one, it’s so boring and irritating to play your 30th match in a row against the same copy/paste “good” deck over and over… That’s never been what I like about MTG, I don’t even particularly care about winning or losing, just make it interesting.

Second, that glitch where even if you set your reactions to some huge stack of combo triggers to automatically resolve, there are times when Arena will still time you out, and there’s nothing you can do about it. They should fix that.

Third, I just really want the rest of the old cards added!

I think you’d be surprised! Honestly I would consider myself very much an amateur too. I’d love to see what you’re working on, even if it is less ambitious. Those are the best projects to me because they’re low stress.

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.