I love the original patientgamers subreddit so I was stoked to find this community. And because lemmy seems to have a more knowledgeable crowd any topic I posted here had great engagement and discussions, despite the small community. I am too busy to be a mod but maybe I can help by sparking this discussion: what would be needed to keep this sub going?
This is actually one of the two most active game-related communities on Lemmy (the other being BeeHaw’s general “Games” community) I’ve seen. I’m not sure what revitalization is even needed.
I can’t post about game impressions that often because I am very slow at my gaming… With that said I just finished The Last Window for Nintendo DS again (remember next to nothing about the plot) and god I had a blast with it!
I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a visual novel, but it would be wiser to play Hotel Dusk first if you haven’t yet, as The Last Window is a sequel.
Like others have mentioned, I am in the same boat of having multiple communities to follow with the same name but on different instances and I forget about others or (more likely) don’t even know that others exist.
It does bug me that I can’t group communities that exist on different instances together. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to a collection of communities that I can give a label to.
A way to group all patientgamers communities together would be a huge help.
It’s just the way the whole federation stuff works I guess. And I like it…Except for when I don’t 😂
I posted a question to my hometown lemmy community and wondered why I wasn’t getting any responses. Then realised it had ~1 active user per month… who was probably me.
This community seems pretty jumping by comparison!
If it is a community rather than an instance it might still get some views. A lot of people on Lemmy are still browsing by all/new and they’d see it in that instance and wherever that community is federated.
I dunno I never really fit in that sub because I am not only a patient gamer but I also don’t care to play every game under the sun. I’m patient because I don’t spend money on upgrading my rig and because I enjoy playing 1 game for 1000 hours rather than 100 games for 10 hours. I just beat MHW: Iceborne recently and like, that’s pretty cool. I might buy the new Diablo 2 update some day maybe. What else do I gotta say?
I need to find an appropriate community to vent about microtransactions in mobile games. I just dipped into that world since I have more downtime out of the house, but I’m pretty disgusted with the quality of mobile gaming right now. What happened?!
You sound like you might enjoy a Steam Deck. So many great games available on PC, you don’t even need to take a glance at any micro transaction infested games.
Mobile games have basically always been like that. It’s practically Shovelware: The Industry. They’re cheap and quick to make compared to other games and mtx make crazy money, so they’re basically the equivalent of those cheap Chinese clothing brands that pop up out of nowhere for a month on Amazon and then change names to something like Zivaldie.
I was really disappointed by mobile games on Android when I jumped on that, though some of it is just that the things that I’d call at least halfway decent are also released on other platforms.
I would recommend looking at Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which a roguelike aimed at a touch interface that’s open-source, free, and on F-Droid. I’d call it the best open-source Android game that I’ve played.
I think the two main points would be already mentioned regular “what are you playing” posts and just writing yourelf whenever you have a chance. I think that livier communities encourage engagement while “dead” ones make people less willing to participate as that means they’ll more likely to become the center of attention and not everyone is comfortable with that.
Personally, I’ve been meaning to write some posts about the stuff I played recently but just didn’t have time to do so. Maybe this week…
Did not know this existed. Can't say I specifically wait three months but tend to just play what comes my way. I like never complete games so they go on forever for me. Imma sub.
We’ve had trouble over at true gaming getting things cooking as well. Maybe I can reach out to the mods and see if there’s some cooperation to be had here as we’re likely too fragmented at present. I’ll talk to our mod team today and see if we can think of something.
Even if it makes sense to have all of them, becuase they have different-but-similar purposes or goals, maybe they can crosslink to each other in their sidebars. Some subreddits have had luck cross-promoting like that.
!truegaming. Try to use the bang syntax when linking communities rather than direct linking it like that, so that others can click it and access it from their own instance.
Also, on the user side of that, for when someone doesn’t use said syntax, note that there’s a Firefox, Chrome, and Edge extension, “Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin”, where one can set one’s home instance. It’ll add a button in the sidebar in threads on remote instances where one can just click on “view in my home instance”.
Finally got around to trying that extension out. And wow was it significantly less useful than I was expecting.
I was first offput by its settings page. “Home instance” is clear enough, but then it also needs a list of instances to “change display”. No idea what that’s supposed to do.
But the real problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything useful. Yeah if I’m on lemmy.world/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, I can click it and be taken to aussie.zone/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, but I can do that really easily manually. The actual useful convenient thing would be if I were at lemmy.world/post/14353571 and clicking the button took me to aussie.zone/post/8919002
But instead, clicking the button displays this popup:
I know that works for Kbin users, but I’m not always 100% clear on what works for other instances, so I just go with my old habit of linking the URL. Sounds like that’s a bad habit though! Appreciate the tip
I’m pretty sure at this point that the bang syntax has enough inertia that if a given Threadiverse server implementation doesn’t support it, it should. I don’t think that the syntax is particularly flawed. Well, other than that it doesn’t directly map to the URL’s syntax, a la the Reddit convention of “/r/foo” or the kbin convention of “/b/”, which might make it less-intuitive.
Hmm. Actually, this should be pretty easy to test, because…the magic of the Threadiverse’s guest access and federation.
I don’t know of an active sublinks instance, and nobody on fedia.io – the largest mbin instance – appears to presently be subscribed to !patientgamers.
Alright I’m probably being a dummy. Nothing happens when I do !truegaming - would love some assistance because clearly, I have less of a grasp on this platform than I thought I did. I used to know this lol
On lemmy instances, the visible text is “!” and then “truegaming@kbin.social”.
On kbin instances – and I really think that this should be changed – the instance renders the visible text to be “!” and then “truegaming”.
Both still create a valid link to it if you use the syntax with the appended “@instancename”. Just on kbin, you don’t get to see what someone actually typed. You can hover the mouse over it to see the instance to which it’s linking.
Here’s a direct link to kbin.social to see what my comment looks like there:
Hmm. No, actually, kbin appears to be mangling the rendering, but that’s apparently because it’s breaking on the blockquote text, not the link syntax.
looks exasperated
Okay. Let me see if I can fix the blockquote bit.
EDIT: Working. It looks like kbin blows up if you stick the bang syntax in a “four leading spaces from the beginning of the line” blockquote, but is okay if you surround the text by backticks. The kbin guys oughta fix that. But…the link should work fine in normal text. Just becomes an issue if you’re trying to show people what the actual syntax is.
EDIT2: No, dammit. It’s still broken on kbin. I know that this can work, because my other comment in the thread about Instance Assistant renders using bang syntax just fine on kbin and uses the same syntax. Hmm.
Well, I am thinking that there is something broken kbin side. Maybe report the comment as a bug to the kbin guys (or if they’re overloaded – I understand that Ernest got kind of overwhelmed – maybe the mbin guys, as I am assuming that they can pull patches from each other).
EDIT3: It apparently works fine on mbin, so I’m assuming that they’ve already patched whatever bug is on kbin:
The monthly recommendation thread is from 3 months ago so doing that regularly is a start. It at least shows the community is active if it gets updated on time.
I liked the weekly/bi-weekly „What are you playing“ posts, but they seem to have stopped, even on the bigger „games“ subs.
I‘d post about games I‘ve played lately (like Unravel) but I feel like „was a cool game with a cool style which made me enjoy the graphics even today and was interesting to platinum“ doesn‘t start much of a discussion.
Maybe I‘m just jaded by Reddit‘s „ackshually“ culture that jumps on you if a post‘s not a well thought out thesis, but I feel pressured to deliver substantial quality when posting (not commenting) on boards and I‘m too tired from the day for that.
Which is why I liked the „What are you playing“ posts since I could just drop a one liner and comment on other one liners of people who are enjoying games I‘ve enjoyed as well lol
I‘m on another patient gamers sub, and the games sub on lemmy.world. The biggest weakness of Lemmy IMO is how fractured communities can become due to very similar subs on different instances - which this is now an example of, I suppose, since I had no idea about the ones you mentioned lol
I‘ll check them out later, although it obviously doesn‘t help this sub specifically
I‘m on another patient gamers sub, and the games sub on lemmy.world.
Heh, fair enough.
I had no idea about the ones you mentioned lol
If you hit lemmyverse.net, they’ve got a “search all instances by communities by name” feature, which I think is probably currently the most-realistic way to find communities across all of the Threadiverse.
Note that their kbin indexing isn’t great – you need to explicitly choose “kbin magazines” from the upper-right hamburger menu; it doesn’t combine kbin and lemmy results. And they don’t currently index at least kbin.social, which is the largest kbin instance.
The biggest weakness of Lemmy IMO is how fractured communities can become due to very similar subs on different instances
Agreed, and also why I think Lemmy will never progress past a niche audience despite being capable of doing so. It’d be nice if there was a feature that allowed instances to merge all like-named communities into a singular one. I know cross posting was meant to help address the problem, but that’s a manual process that falls quite short in resolving the core issue.
I don’t think it’s that fundamental. I mean, Reddit has one shared namespace for subreddit names, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to use one keyword. Like, you have /r/guns and /r/firearms, stuff like that. Nothing merges those.
And even for /r/patientgamers, there’s overlap. Like, /r/patientgamers probably has a fair bit of overlap with /r/retrogaming (note: !retrogaming and !retrogaming exist) and /r/truegaming.
I do think that making lemmyverse.net’s search feature or something similar that spans multiple instances to help people find communities across many instances more easily would help, and putting support for that in clients. The Threadiverse model of having an instance not index communities until someone on an instance subscribes helps scalability, but if the main way to search for communities only searches communities that an instance knows about, it kind of kills discoverability for users.
In regard to Reddit having the same problem, I agree it does to an extent. But like you said, it only allows for synonyms or alternate wording for the same topic in a subreddit’s name. On Lemmy, since instances are different, the fractured communities can be named the exact same thing. Most casual users are not going to realize this and think that the one community they’re in is not active when on another instance, the other like-named community might have grown and is now quite active since they initially setup their subscriptions. They’ll never know unless they happen to run another search and see the alternate community’s user count.
Maybe I’m wrong and it isn’t a big deal. But I do agree that searching and indexing would be a great step in helping discoverability.
There’s some site that’s designed just to use a bot account on various major instances to subscribe a new community. It waits until there are something like 10 regular users subscribed, then unsubscribes. You could just plonk in a community name and have it do so. That helps discoverability but kind of clashes with the whole intended scalability decision in lemmy/kbin/etc design not to slurp in content from all communities out there.
I think this is the github project page, but someone was running an instance of it.
googles
Man, I can’t even find the instance that someone was running, which does kind of maybe highlight the need for a central “Threadiverse wiki” that links to all this stuff. fediverse.observer, lemmyverse.net, fedidb.org, join-lemmy.org, etc. There’s some other tool that someone made to measure post federation latency, so you could see what instances are overloaded or not working. There are a ton of useful tools out there, but no central hub. I keep finding them when someone links to them on the Threadiverse and then never being able to find them again.
My own home instance, lemmy.today, has always had a request in the sidebar asking people to subscribe to a bunch of communities so that they become visible to the instance, which seems like kind of an awkward workaround for discoverability:
🥹 Make sure to join a lot of remote communities to get a good feed going. How to do that is explained here.
Ohhhh, that’s a good thought. Beehaw.org’s pretty aggressive about defederation when they have problems with users. I’m on lemmy.today, and they haven’t defederated from there, so I’m still seeing what’s current on there.
Well, a direct link to see what’s on there, bypassing defederations: beehaw.org/c/gaming
I‘d post about games I‘ve played lately (like Unravel) but I feel like „was a cool game with a cool style which made me enjoy the graphics even today and was interesting to platinum“ doesn‘t start much of a discussion.
I’ll be the first to admit I mainly lurk, but I’d be interested to read about games people find interesting. Who knows, might be a title which flew under my radar and was one introduction away from being my all time favorite.
But yea, the “what are you playing” threads were fun reads.
I think it’s lower pressure to post comments in those threads, too. People like to talk about what they are playing, but sometimes they only have the time/effort for a sentence or two.
In my experience, having a weekly sticky like that is essential for engagement. There are plenty of people here, they just aren’t making threads. If you get people in the habit of dropping by once a week, they are more likely to post.
I’d also make the suggestion to scale the rule back to 6 months from 12. It’s a good idea in general for a slow community and there were multiple big games that came out in that month 7 through 12 time period. Can always change it back when the community is active. /r/patientgamers was 6 months until semi-recently.
That said, this doesn’t have to be a carbon copy of the subreddit. I liked the Meme Monday suggestion that was posed. Anything to drive engagement.
I could be very much wrong since it depends on what communities one subscribes to but I’m getting a feeling that activity on Lemmy is decreasing in general.
Lemmy 0.19 changed how monthly active users are counted (including upvotes) and lemmy.world upgraded to that version 3 months ago. I’d be more interested in post and comment counts.
Comments have grown around an average of 0.8 million comments for the last 3 months. Posts experienced a drop from around 6 million to 4 million from January to February but have been slowly increasing since to 4.8 million.
This month looks set to have very large post and comment counts though. Posts are already at 5 million and comments at 13.8 million.
There’s also going to be a seasonal rhythm to these counts. What times of the year are people more active and posting, etc. Lemmy is so young still, it’s hard to just look at the chart and see what’s what.
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