There’s some serious false equivalency going on if you think a $10 “support the devs” pack (that was given out to free for everyone who bought early access) is worthy of ire like the usual AAA MTX hellscape.

Launcher is trash though.

Assuming you haven’t already, Jocat’s “Crap Guide to D&D” series is an entertaining little primer! IIRC the most relevant one would be the character sheet episode, followed by the individual class episodes.

I competed in a tiny lil Olympic sport no one outside of the shooting sports has ever heard of (double trap). Wasn’t nearly good enough to attend international competition, but the competitor pool was small and I knew plenty who did.

The IOC and the Olympics are nothing more than a scam. I respect the athletes dedication but after seeing the IOC’s scumfuckery up close I have 0 interest in the Olympics.

I’ve only found that true for days I am prompting without a specific image in mind. The second something specific gets in my head, and even hours of fiddling and tweaking prompts won’t get the result that satisfies me (though I might get a bunch of cool tangential output along the way).

I mean, if it’s some attempt at a passion project I guess it could be? But I’m usually just letting my GPU churn out cool wallpapers or character art in the background while I watch YouTube. There’s no real soul going into it, but I’m not pretending to put in any, either.

I’ve always explained it like this:

Every time you press that button, you’ll get an image. Maybe even a really good image. But it will never be the image you had in mind.

There have been a couple of these, though this one is new to me!

It always makes me sad that they never seem to gain much traction. It seems like disconnected from a larger platform (and potentially the exclusive time window?) they never draw many users.

Just like r/place 😎

Can you elaborate on this?

https://ttrpg.network/ for all things TTRPG!

On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.

Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.

Only 1 for 3 there myself, but I get the point.

One thing I have noticed is a big chunk of the memes posted earlier in June were very dated, ~2010-era Facebook style. Made me wonder if the crowd on here didn’t at least initially skew older.

Lmao he already got banned

I’ve got two.

• 999. It’s an escape room visual novel from late in the DS’s life cycle. I can’t talk about it much without spoiling it, but it absolutely blew me away when I played it. I can’t recommend it enough if you’re a fan of mystery and psychological thrillers. There was a remake released on Steam, and the community is divided on which version is better; I personally strongly recommend it on DS emulator/original hardware, with a spoiler-free guide to the good ending after your first blind playthrough.
• OneShot. It’s very much in the vein of Undertale, but the initial release was slightly earlier. It isn’t quite as tight with its writing as Undertale, but the story evoked some genuine emotions in a way that games rarely manage. As much hype as the latter got, it surprised me that the former is so obscure.

Amazing core gameplay, but a lack of content. The game was pushed as a half-assed live service game, but they never released content at anything close to a live service rate. Coupled with pretty horrendous progression/aggressive MTX pricing at the start, and well…

In fairness for Mastodon, apparently you can migrate instances without starting a new account, unlike Lemmy.

The Fediverse is built on ideals of open source, privacy, decentralization, controlling your own experience and your own data, etc…

How is Fediverse built on privacy and “controlling your own data”? Essentially every action you take on here is public, and there’s no way to ensure all federated servers respect deletion requests. As it currently stands, the Fediverse has fundamental flaws with privacy.

I’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.

The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.

I honestly don’t think Meta even cares about the Fediverse as we know it. Mastodon barely cracked 2.5m active monthly users in late 2022/early 2023, and the Fediverse user counts had been dropping until the Reddit debacle. There’s no way they are agile enough to push this out the door in response to what happened in June, and this is a lot of effort to kill something already in decline with only 0.01% your active monthly user base.

Even so, what do they gain by killing Mastodon? Paying for the dev work and the server cost to host their own instance? All the data on the Fediverse that they’d want to sell is publicly accessible anyway; they could grab/sell it all without going through this effort. I think they see long term value in the ActivityPub protocol, and they are positioning themselves to get ahead of any other major corporate ActivityPub-based platform.

I suspect the intention is that if another major platform appears (BlueSky, anyone?) that it will pressure them to also implement ActivityPub, thereby increasing the pool of data on the Fediverse and letting Meta analyze and sell it too.

I apologize, you are correct; I assumed every account displayed as “[name]@[instance]” if it wasn’t native to that instance, and that every account that was just “[name]” was a native one, but it seems like some (mainly kbin.social?) accounts don’t do that.