comfy

The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don’t know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there’s a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.

Seconding, Mindustry is much more visually pleasing to me than Factorio. From the screenshots I’m looking at, Factorio’s graphics just don’t have consistent composition, so elements in the same image look out of place. Shadows aren’t even going in the same direction or logical lengths, and only sometimes they’re pure black giving weirdly high contrast in certain objects and not others. Many environments are various shades of puke colors. The perspective looks weird to me, as if we could turn the map 90 degrees and then all the buildings would look like the leaning tower of Piza.

I would compare and contrast between the original Fallout, perhaps, or as Captain Aggravated here else said, “Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit.”.

Now, whether these are problems or style is a matter of opinion, and furthermore whether it should have an appealing style (as Cpt. Agg also said, pollution is a theme in the game) but some of those points are objectively straying from conventionally appealing elements.

I wouldn’t call the game ‘extremely high difficulty’, it even has some easier levels early on (at least when I played it a couple of years ago). I’m not a regular tower-defense or sim game player and I was able to complete Serpulo. It can be a challenging puzzle at times, but it’s not a game I’d feel a need to warn people about difficulty-wise.

Disclaimer: this game may be addictive for some individuals.

Seconding (although I have a tendency to marathon the campaign of any game I think is excellent). No need for predatory tricks like loots, this is just a damn fun game.

It’s very weird for a FOSS enthusiast not to advertise one of the best open-source games of all time so here I am trying to make it spoken about again.

IIRC I found it in a ‘top 100 FOSS games’ list because it was one of the first which wasn’t an open-sourced cloning of an existing game. No disrespect for clones and adaptations at all, but it’s extra special to see original softwares so good that even people who don’t care about FOSSness would use them.

I love a good FPS and I loved Mindustry.

What does that have to do with Cory’s concerns? They don’t want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.

Thinking of the projects I work on, I don’t understand the value in categorizing by language, rather than theme (~/Development/Web/, ~/Development/Games/) or just the project folders right there.

That’s serious stuff if true. I would often the upload date to avoid reuploads and regurgitated (and lower visual quality) content. It’s also extremely useful to know how outdated some advice or guide is.

I assume you also have to trust the servers which the accounts you’re messaging are stored on. (Although there are real situations where all users will be on the same server, where this is obviously a great benefit.)

It turns out, mods are gods.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.

Haha they thought it was too easy and were proven wrong!

Honestly, if a place is obscure enough, even smaller barriers of entry help, like forums that don’t let you post on important boards until you build a reputation. There’s only so much effort an adversary is willing to put in, and if there isn’t a financial incentive or huge political incentive, that barrier could be low.

One of the first few instances I heard of was botsin.space, which has been around since at least 2017. Bots aren’t new. (Not sure where you’re pulling “AI” from, this is old* tech, and I don’t mean that negatively)

(edit: I accidentally a word and didn’t realize you wrote ‘auto-report instead of deleting them’. Read the following with a grain of salt)

I’ve played (briefly) with automated moderation bots on forums, and the main thing stopping me from going much past known-bad profiles (e.g. visited the site from a literal spamlist) is not just false positives but malicious abuse. I wanted to add a feature which would censor an image immediately with a warning if it was reported for (say) porn, shock imagery or other extreme content, but if a user noticed this, they could falsely report content to censor it until a staff member dismisses the report.

Could an external brigade of trolls get legitimate users banned or their posts hidden just by gaming your bot? That’s a serious issue which could make real users have their work deleted, and in my experience, users can take that very personally.

Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it’s theirs.

Moving Forward

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With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]

On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about “Free” and “Libre”: those names are great for saying “This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]”, and that’s what I’ll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.

IMO, the worst thing about “Minetest” is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It’s certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone’s small hobby project. ‘Luanti’ is much better.

No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.

Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.

Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.