Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.
Discord is even more ephemeral than Lemmy/Reddit. Conversations fly by in minutes or seconds. Discord as a specific platform is starting to enshittify as well.
And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.
I find it interesting how thread necromancy can be encouraged on some forums but discouraged on others depending on the local culture. On the pro necro side I can see people wanting to maintain and consolidate discussions rather than constantly rehash them. On the anti necro side I can see how necroing a controversial thread could re-ignite a long extinguished flame war.
I think I recognize your avatar from [email protected] if that makes you feel any better.
Probably not. I only associate them with colors. Red is for health, blue is for mana, green is stamina.
Real life kinda sucks right now. My reality has mechs :)
Our only galactic neighbor, Vulpithecus fidelis
This isn’t part of the fediverse, it’s an old-school phpBB forum, but you may also like The CBB. That’s where I do the lion’s share of my conworlding/conlanging. There’s also FrathWiki, and The Zompist bulletin Board, which overlaps considerably with the CBB but is IMO more unpleasant due to allowing IRL politics.
I post on there often.
That’s more or less how I go about it. I’m both the author and the only audience member worth pleasing. They’re reflections of my interests, hopes, anger, and fear, so I don’t expect what I do share to be interesting to anyone but me.
The best way to find something you’ve lost is to buy another one, then you’ll find the original.
Antivaxxers are chaos cultists who want to share Grandfather Nurgle’s gifts with humanity.
Sometimes my dead dogs visit me in my dreams. I know they’re supposed to be dead in the dream and I give them lots of pets and belly rubs. Then I wake up feeling great. Yes I’m 99% sure it’s a product of my unconscious mind but sometimes…
All animals have limited intelligence. Humans are animals, therefore humans have limited intelligence. Take a chimp or a dolphin and try to teach them calculus. Now imagine what realities lie beyond human understanding. There’s a whole epistemological realm of the unknowable out there.
It’s weirdly beautiful in a melancholy way. I imagine most intelligent species are at least somewhat social, and they have an intrinsic desire to seek fellowship with others. I also imagine most would possess curiosity in order to seek out something other than themselves. So there’s this chorus of unheard voices calling up into the void “is anyone there? We’re over here. Hello? Anyone?”
And sometimes I look up into the sky and wonder if I’m looking at some distant soul who’s also looking back at me, wondering the same thing
go fight them and ruin their world (cause that’s what we do and love).
We are space orcs
I don’t believe aliens have been to earth so there’s nothing to cover up. I’m personally pessimistic that we’ll ever encounter alien life, intelligent or not. The universe is so vast and the time scale so deep that there’s certainly something else out there but the odds of us running into one another are next to impossible.
But I like to think that somewhere out there there’s another species just as alone as we are, howling into the void. And I wonder what would happen if we did finally meet, if they found us after groping around in the darkness for who knows how long and rather than attacking us or lecturing us they just rejoiced that they weren’t alone anymore.And we’d ask them about the vast galaxy-spanning metacivilization of countless other sophonts that most sci-fi seems to take for granted and they’d shrug and say “Nope it’s just you and us, lonely together.”
Several years ago there was a strike somewhere in our neighborhood, close enough to damage several electronics in my house, mostly via the network. I lost my router, and the built-in ethernet port on my PC.
When I was in high school a friend and I were waiting outside the school when it started raining. Lightning struck the field across the street. I wanted to look around the area to see if I could find some fulgurite (sand that gets fused into glass by lightning) but never got a chance to.
I have several antennas in my backyard (amateur radio) and have to disconnect my radios whenever lightning gets close. I can tell when a storm is in the area through the radio even when the weather around me is clear. I really should get a lightning detector.
On a related note, some government entity in the US (I believe it’s either NOAA or the NWS) keeps a public database of lighting deaths.
Warhammer 401(k), as in you have to cash in your retirement fund to pay for the hobby.
I’m the kind of guy who devours lore through YT videos and fan wikis without ever touching the actual franchise, and I’ve been doing that with 40K for years before I thought about buying a model. When I looked at the prices I decided I’d rather eat food.
“I’m a person and I have personal space!” --me if this ever happens.
I actually tried this, with nodeBB rather than Discourse. Thing is I don’t trust myself to secure people’s PII, and I was kind of stepping on the toes of an already established community that I’m a part of and had no intention of fracturing. I just didn’t like (and still don’t tbh) their use of phpBB. I want to be able to use markdown instead of bbcode and I want a user mention feature. But the forum is the people, not the platform.