It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

I’m a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I’ve only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the “had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn’t get out of Bronze league” sense of suck.

But I love it. It’s my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

Mine’s more like slash fiction.

I’ve never given the distinction much thought, but as I recall (and it’s been many years since I’ve read the Ender books) in Speaker for the Dead Jane was pretty much an AI, an evolved form of the fantasy game in Ender’s Game. In later books Card may have more explicitly applied his Mormon-influenced concept of a soul that exists prior to, and after, inhabiting a physical form, to the character of Jane. But when I think of Jane, it’s the Jane of Speaker for the Dead, as that’s the book in the series (along with Ender’s Game) that I read most often.

When I was younger I had a crush on Jane from Speaker for the Dead, so I wouldn’t be weirded out by that person, cause I’d probably be that person. 😅

Stormgate and ZeroSpace are looking like the spiritual successors to Starcraft, with the former developed largely by ex-Blizzard staff and the latter by some prominent members of the Starcraft community.

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

reddit has the ability to hide post vote counts for a certain time to mitigate this. It’s a feature that’s worth bringing across.

(I also think it’s worth capping the number of upvotes and downvotes a post/comment can get - and to do so asymmetrically, eg no more than 10 downvotes and 100 upvotes.)

That’s how I read it too.

Adding a !Musicals@kbin.social identifier didn’t work, so removed it from the post.

how I sign up to mastodon instances and whatnot with kbin

As I understand it, you don’t sign up to a mastodon instance with kbin. Rather, kbin has the ability to act as a way of following fediverse users and hashtags in the same way as mastodon does.

In other words, if mastodon is the fediverse’s version of twitter, and lemmy is the fediverse’s version of reddit, then kbin is a combination of the two.

However, while kbin’s lemmy/reddit features are maturing nicely, the mastodon/twitter functions are still pretty embryonic. (Bear in mind that kbin is a young project that for most of its life had only a single developer.)

For example:

• On kbin you can follow fediverse users by clicking on the “Follow” button in their profile (similar to the way you can follow users on mastodon), but I don’t think there’s a way of having their posts appear on a timeline yet.
• Similarly, while you can create a magazine that follows certain hashtags in the “microblog” section of a magazine, you can’t currently do that as part of your kbin personal profile in the way you can choose to follow hashtags on mastodon and have them appear in your feed. (And the propagation of hashtags between kbin and the wider fediverse seems to be haphazard at the moment in any case.)

What I would recommend for now is to create a mastodon account on a mastodon instance of your choice, and treat the two ecoystems as largely independent, until kbin’s feature set matures.

Arts and culture is a very broad topic area. It covers (among other things):

• performing arts (eg plays, musicals, film, TV, radio)
• visual arts (eg painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts)
• literature (eg books, poetry, the various literary genres)
• design (eg fashion, typography, architecture)

Mastodon has several instances focussed on different aspects of arts & culture, eg:

• https://artsculture.media/about
• https://mastodon.art/about
• https://mastodon.design/about

Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren’t). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.

Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:

• https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=theatre
• https://kbin.social/magazines?query=theatre&fields=names_descriptions&federation=all&adult=hide
• https://browse.feddit.de/

Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren’t necessarily comprehensive. So it’s worth spreading your search over several tools.

I’ve been thinking of starting a theatre-focused kbin instance, but realistically not until the platform has matured, as my sysadmin days are well, well, well behind me. In the meantime I’ve started a Musicals magazine on kbin.social.

I wonder if the activitypub protocol (or, if not the protocol then some other layer) allows for the idea of “community mirrors”. The way that the protocol works at the moment, as I understand it, only the host instance has a complete record of a community’s posts and comments. But if there was a way for a community to designate one or more other instances as “mirrors” which maintain a complete sync of a community’s content (going back all the way to the community’s founding), that would lower the exposure to instances going down.

There would need to be a process (both technical and administrative) for a mirror to be designated as the new host instance should the original host disappear.

This would build in additional resilience into the fediverse model, by taking advantage of its distributed nature.