That’s wild! I’m sorry that you have to deal with that.

130%??? Are we talking like the stereotypical image of a collapsing country with patients laying in gurneys in the hallway?

The absolute top 3 I can think of right now:

• Broforce
• Heave Ho
• Hidden in Plain Sight (not co-op, but it’s hilarious to play with others and doesn’t take much skill so it doesn’t feel unbalanced if some of the players have played it for much longer than others)

All 3 are 2D, funny, and great fun to play in a group.

I think that the technology may have evolved a lot since the early days of photogrammetry, or perhaps making a 3D model of a face is easier than a large object like in your example. Also, how do you suppose they got 3D scans of Picasso’s and Warhol’s faces for those perfect, life-like rubber faces on that video? They were both dead decades before the development of 3D scanning and photogrammetry.

Finally, here are some examples of photo to 3D model applications that appear to only need one photo:

• https://facegen.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tETtRwCnLyg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VahuZjIL5ME

The impression I have is that Germans are bigger users of the Fediverse in general than other countries, as in statistically overrepresented. Mastodon is originally a German project. Germans also created a Fediverse application for buying and selling second-hand items, Flohmarkt (Flea Market). Some other posts here have mentioned that Germans are culturally/historically more interested in privacy than many others, which may help explain the interest in the Fediverse. Finally, Lemmy is also an European project, so it makes sense that there would be more Europeans here, and Germany is the largest European economy and the most populous Western-European nation. Those are all probably factors contributing to this.

Millions of users, no. That only happens with either massive marketing and/or sheer luck to become the popular thing.

Niche communities, yes, if the software is tweaked a little. We already have niche communities. Now it’s just a question of making sure that the people who are interested in those topics and subscribed become more aware of posts in those communities. In other words, just a different algorithm for the main feed. Lemmy and Piefed have already tried adding new algorithms, but they didn’t seem to do the job (at least Lemmy’s new algorithm - I haven’t tried Piefed’s yet). Oh, and those new algorithms that would promote posts in niche communities to have more even standing with posts in large, general communities would need to become the default or at least widely adopted by users in order to have the intended effect.