ElectroVagrant

ElectroVagrant, 9 days ago

You might cross-post to !entomology as well, see what others there think it may be.

ElectroVagrant, 12 days ago

Surprised nobody’s mentioned Weightless ebooks or Smashwords yet. You didn’t mention region, so I can’t assure these will work for you, but worth checking out regardless to see if they may.

ElectroVagrant, 12 days ago

Thanks for this! I think I may have come across it at some point but never bookmarked it for whatever reason, corrected that now!

ElectroVagrant, 12 days ago

I can’t recall the exact details, but I’ve read from some other communities talk of there being some federation slowdowns between lemmy world and other instances, so maybe this is related?

…In fact, this comment in reply to you may serve as an example of the delays, as I responded only a few minutes after yours.

ElectroVagrant, 12 days ago

You might look at this intro guide from one of Lemmee’s admins, or this one from one of Lemmy World’s admins. They give decent overviews, and you can set aside the site-specific stuff where relevant, e.g. Lemmee’s image size limits.

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

It’s the site you’re on, so in your case: lemm.ee.

Instance in this situation is usually the same as website.

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

Oh! They really made this from scratch! At first I thought this was going to be like a kit assembly/painting video (which are good too!), but this is more than that.

Cool!

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

Image description:
A cartoon sloth in the top panel looks at their to do list that has one item, “just vibe”.
In the bottom panel, the sloth is laid back with sunglasses on and a drink beside them, smiling contentedly.

---

This sloth knows what’s up

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

I think some of this may be the default Active sort setting for the all/federated feed keeping some communities and their posts around the top. Might be mistaken, but my understanding is that it primarily elevates upvoted posts with recent comments, leaning on recent comments for keeping it visible.

Problem is, that means some posts that may get a decent amount of upvotes but no or few comments may gradually get buried, only rising to the top briefly or on some slower days.

I think as a result of getting buried, some may not see the other stuff they might want to talk about to comment on, and besides that, I sometimes get the sense there are a lot of lurkers around here, voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add or not wanting to risk getting into arguments (if not both).

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

I think alongside trying to foster more upbeat/constructive communities, it may also help to have a mixture of novel/different posts and if relevant, helpful posts.

For example, a few communities I’ve noticed are…

!amateursatellites

!pocketknife

!wallpapers

The first is definitely niche, second is maybe somewhere between, and the last benefits from being widely appealing, but what they each have in common is that there’s something different to come across from their posts. First is satellite imagery, second courtesy of a couple posters is some weirder pocket knives, and the last is more or less like pics but with a bonus of being a variety of images you could use on your phone or PC.

A tricky part with each of these so far has been that despite some upvotes, you may not see posts from them too often depending on your sort setting as they don’t often draw too many comments to each post.

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

I tend to agree. I think both of those communities are good for communities starting out or just opening up after adjusting some settings mishaps (e.g. whoops set to NSFW, mods only, or language settings), but they don’t really fit for trying to get additional attention after that.

I made a small attempt over in General Discussion with this post encouraging people to share active communities, but nobody’s added to it with their own lists of active communities or mentioning a single or couple communities they’ve been enjoying. 🤷‍♀️

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

I take it this is okay? 😅

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

What you did at the end can be a good approach tbh. Be curious and ask something about the post, or something in it that you’re not sure of or familiar with, or if the OP hasn’t added any body text or indications in the title and simply posted, what their opinion on it is, or if it’s like a show/story/site/product, what’s the premise or what’s up with it and what they like about it.

Also if you don’t want to focus it on the OP, in the absence of other comments, you can say as much like, “Do you (including anyone else reading) know/think [somethingsomething here]?”

ElectroVagrant, 13 days ago

Realize this is a little late but I don’t think that matters too much.

I just started checking out Mob Psycho 100 and it’s…Not what I thought it might be, in a good way! The environment art and the creature art is really sharp and fun. Btw, if any other anime people are around, you might check out !anime for a community to discuss anime in.

Besides that I watched a couple bad/B-movies a few days ago. One knew what it was and was the sillier for it, called Repligator. It’s dated and has some of those rough edges to be aware of (typical sexism, awkward but sort of positive handling of trans stuff), but it’s a fun time as scientists trying to teleport people accidentally turn them into women, and after some mishaps, into women that turn into humanoid reptiles after they orgasm.

The other was called Reptilian, which was a Korean attempt at Godzilla, except named Yonggary, and they pronounce it like…Young Gary, so it’s almost impossible to take seriously. Also it turns out Yonggary is being controlled by some aliens to try to destroy humanity and take over the Earth, so…If you’re into cheesy giant monster movies it’s about what you’d expect.

ElectroVagrant, 21 days ago

i’ll tell ya how to undo this, but it’ll involve going over their heads, and you won’t believe this but then you’ll be…

you ready? you really can't undo this onesturgeon general’d

ElectroVagrant, 21 days ago

Aah, I’m only in the midst of season 4 right now, and I’m not sure if what I’m watching it through goes to season 5 or not. I’m only now realizing this series is still ongoing, so I may stop after season 4, particularly if that’s all that’s available anyway. 😄

ElectroVagrant, 21 days ago

How do you go about following manga btw? Physical copies, or can you buy them digitally now? I used to try to follow some manga with physical copies, but for long-running series that got silly, and libraries around me only carried a few older volumes if they carried any.

(I know of other ways to get them fwiw, but a quick glance at the terms for this instance says not to discuss those, so let’s not get into them 😅 )

ElectroVagrant, 16 days ago

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).