This is the kind of AI/machine learning I can get behind, especially given it may sort of help even out some of its energy use in the process. More of this application of the tech could be great if the results hold up.

This timing is pretty amusing.

The other day I shared this video (Failure of Battlebit Remastered), which itself was uploaded by its creator only a week ago.

It’s great to see the devs coming back to it. Tbh I don’t think it’s my sort of game personally, but I typically prefer to see projects revisited and restored well instead of abandoned.

In a better world, this (or one of its forks) would have taken off instead of Mastodon. It makes a way better case for itself by its distinct features compared to Mastodon, which is too easy to ignore (by everyday people) as Nerd-Twitter.

Some apps (e.g. Voyager/Thunder) and web frontends (Tesseract? not sure which tbh) enable keyword filtering.

In the case of the apps, it’s found in settings under filters & blocks or filters, respectively. Unfortunately I can’t recall which web frontends enable it for sure, but I do remember there seemed to be fewer of them that did last I checked.

Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.

Keep an eye on !webrevival@lemm.ee, search via Marginalia Search, and check out the ooh directory among other things.

Also look out for webrings (or similar) on some of the sites you may find, as they can help you find other likeminded net people.

Some people are trying to bring back some of the old navigation methods, but with some improvements, to keep the open net around.

RIP, take my wheels away, I wiped out on the wheelie!

It weally was, I can’t believe I whiffed that wheelie

I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.

Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.

You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:

https://lemmyverse.net/

Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation, & image upload limit is 500kb per image.

Source is instance sidebar, but if you’re using an app that’s gonna be found in a variety of places. In Voyager for example it’s under Communities>3 dot menu in the upper right>Instance sidebar.

Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).

Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.

It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.

I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.

Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

I don’t think so. The largest ask communities, according to their own descriptions, say they’re for more open-ended questions, albeit AskLemmy@lemmy.ml seems to be more lax about it (and it seems like maybe AskLemmy@lemmy.world has kinda relaxed on it too).

There’s the newer !ask@lemm.ee that doesn’t have the open-ended part to their description, so might be a good fit.

Tbh for all anyone knows they may be petting tardigrades regularly

It’s just a different Wafrn instance, which is why you couldn’t log into it.

As far as I’m aware it’s the first and only other Wafrn instance run by someone besides the creator of Wafrn. Hopefully in time there may be more.

Yes. Alongside what others have mentioned, I think a couple factors are context oversight (in part from context collapse at times) and subsequent fumbling of code switching.

Many primarily comment in news or politics threads (see front pages with sort set to Active) or otherwise more serious communities, so I think it carries through in their other interactions elsewhere. It’s something of a bummer because generally neither party to fumbled interactions feels good about it.

Similar situation to Irelephant, first I’m reading about Loforo. Doing some brief research, it doesn’t look like Loforo’s integrated ActivityPub that much, nor does it seem to be open source so others could run their own instances.

In those respects Wafrn is the clear choice for a federated Tumblr-like, as it’s open source and integrates ActivityPub thoroughly. As a matter of fact, a little more digging and I found where someone has been helping test run another Wafrn instance in the form of “evil” Wafrn.

Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.

It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.