Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

  • 0 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • This is really good!

    One thing that stands out to me on the reverse view - other than the Roger Rabbit tire, of course - is the shame of the roof as you move toward the front. The front view seems to suggest the slope comes down to be almost parallel with the ground, while the reverse view suggests it points up like 20 degrees. I don’t know which is ground truth for this model car, but I suspect it comes close to parallel with the ground.

    I can see where it looks like you made changes to the front height of the drivers side window. It’s possible you went a millimetre too high or so there.

    But that’s just nitpicking. Again, it’s a really great sketch.


  • People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers’ minds, to reverse course. It’s the intended outcome.

    Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.

    Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a “spend money” button that players hit over and over again. That’s the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They’re all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.



  • Honestly, the problem with discovery is not that there are not enough posts in a single timeline. Merging local and global feeds makes discoverability worse on Lemmy and kbin, not better, because the timelines display posts, while the space is organized by communities. This means that smaller or niche communities just drown seas of posts from large or highly active ones.

    If you want a real “exploration” timeline, you need one that limits the number of posts from any given community. And that still seems like it’s well served by local/global splits, because the website you join should be meaningful.

    We do not need, nor should we want, a network of “dumb terminal” Fediverse sites. We should be aiming for the local stream to be the big selling point for any given instance, with the ability to interact with remote communities being a value-add. A merged timeline kills local identity, and tells users that their hosting website is a 2nd class citizen in the Fediverse.



  • That’s a shame. As an end user, it’s a really nice experience, but running my own private instance I kept running into issues that just made it really difficult to keep it online, especially once life started to put a lot of pressure on my time and mental health.

    One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of small FOSS projects is that they do very little to actually educate potential users on how to use their stuff. The underlying motivator is often to provide alternatives to existing products, but they fall down entirely when it comes to actually making those alternatives usable for the users of the things they’re trying to provide alternatives for.

    The big ones get big by creating their audience. The small ones look for the small intersection of people who use the mainstream product, care about open source, and also are fluent enough in that world that they already know what to do to make things work, and that pool of users often doesn’t reach any kind of critical mass.




  • Kichae@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they’re the same place.

    I don’t think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don’t think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It’s a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It’s often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.

    I don’t think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn’t fit the tech.

    Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they’re different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth’s sake.

    Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell ‘Mastodon’ as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you’re using invisible. I don’t think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it’s only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They’re like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.

    Because this isn’t Reddit. It doesn’t work like Reddit. It can’t try to be “Reddit, but ____”, because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.

    And one of the things it is is not one space.


  • Kichae@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    community discoverability, […], and moderation tools

    Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There’s a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.

    And on top of that, it’s also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.

    Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.

    not being able to group communities together

    I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.

    Like, it’s fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.





  • That’s just the system. This is what happens when people confuse commerce with capitalism: They think that capitalism is being rewarded for doing commerce better. Instead, capitalism is about leveraging ownership of property and underpaying workers in order to get money for free.

    And the thing about money is that it’s really just a proxy for power. When you only have enough of it to eek out a comfortable life (or less), you don’t really notice, because all of your power goes in to achieving or maintaining that acceptably good life (or hanging on for dear life trying to survive), but once your needs are comfortably and handidly met, money is entirely about being able to make other people do whatever you want. And the more money you have, the more things you can get them to do, or the more of them that you can get to do what you want.

    And if you’ve managed to be one of the lucky ones who just get free money for owning shit, then you have the power at your fingertips to try to grow your power over others exponentially, while still doing no honest work in your days. And if you’re a shitty person who gets off on all of this, that’s exactly what you’ll do.

    The wealthy are insufferably greedy leeching assholes because one does not become wealthy without being greedy, leeching off of others, and being an insufferable asshole.


  • No, that’s not actually reasonable given how federation works. You’re not viewing content on other instance, you’re viewing content imported from other instances. Copies hosted locally. This puts admins in the position of actively hosting content they may find objectionable if it’s allowable on other sites and they’re federating with those sites.

    Your instance is not some neutral community browser for remote communities. It’s not the equivalent of Chrome or Firefox. It’s the equivalent of a website hosting guest authors, and the website admins are responsible on some level for what they choose to host.

    If you want wide open freedom of choice, you have the ability to host your own instance. That’s how you get carte blanch to decide what you see and what you don’t.





  • Here’s the thing, though: Whenever you have a position like “Person for Group”, that Group is being singled out for a reason.

    And that reason is lack of representation.

    To put it another way, so have a Minister for Women is a tacit acknowledgement that the others operate as if men are the default person. All of the other ministers are Ministers for Men.