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I think you should find a smaller, well moderated instance and show it to your parents first. If they consent with her signing up to it, it should be fine and generally speaking there is no practical way for instances to check the age of their members anyways.

Tumblr is being reworked to have a Wordpress backend right now, and Wordpress already has well working ActivityPub support, so yes, Tumblr will very likely happen once they made the switch.

I suspect the technical debt in Tumblr was larger than expected when the first announce federation support, and now it became nearly a full rewrite, which takes time.

The most they can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.

Na, they were quite explicit what their plan is: they realized that there are interesting “content creators” on the fediverse, and that many other “content creators” are eying the fediverse and similar platforms as a way to have more control over the platform they use. And ultimately users will follow the creators, once the creators are sufficiently fed up with being taken hostage by facebook etc. So they are willing to let the creators switch to the fediverse, but want to retain the users as ultimatly that is where their revenue is coming from via advertisement and data harvesting.

We run the latest beta.7 on https://photon.slrpnk.net/

Search on my Akkoma instance works reasonably well. Of course there is no central index, so it can only find what it has federated before.