Where is this? I set up my piefed blahaj account and have spent like the past 3 hours blocking communities after setting up filters that should already be blocking those communities.

It is an absolute slog trying to get a feed that isn’t all just depressing or toxic shit.

Lemmy is toxic as fuck. Decentralization is a good thing, but it doesn’t magically fix social media.

Honestly if I remembered what I did to have something to poke at before Lemmy I’d probably just do that. It’s a mostly unenjoyable compulsion at this point. The whole thing seems to be just childish bickering and depression bait.

Might as well end your career by burning any good will you’ve developed with the rest of it.

I’m just hoping there’s eventually some form of private server similar to FiveM so I can have my Dune roleplay.

My Japanese saw and shinto rasp just sighed in annoyance.

Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.

I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.

I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.

If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.

Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.

Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.

Do those have push to talk?

ITT: Apple customers think everyone is as bad at purchasing decisions as they are.

Letting the Republicans win went so fucking well this year.

What’s that about not learning anything?

I literally could not care less if you disapprove of my response to literally anything.

Okay, but the difference here is pretty stark. YTMND pages were made from people’s individual creativity with no monetary incentive. Nobody was profiting from them, they weren’t being shown via some mysterious algorithm that creators spent all their time trying to appease. They weren’t presented in a format that encouraged constant joyless consumption. They weren’t advertisements or corporate messaging or coopted by fascists. There were no YTMND trad wives or manosphere influencers.

It was literally just people making silly, often irreverent pages to make people laugh. It wasn’t something with the end goal of addicting people to scrolling their way to oblivion for countless hours as the world fell apart around them, and it didn’t literally diminish their cognitive capabilities.

I’m not saying everything on TikTok or other short-form video platforms is bad, but they’re fundamentally different platforms. It isn’t a generational thing. Amazingly, I was alive for YTMND and am also alive for short form videos. It’s not something any generation has an exclusive claim to.

I too find myself at times scrolling through YouTube shorts finding little of value. I too notice that I’m staring at an AI voice telling an engagement-bait story that probably didn’t happen while watching unrelated satisfaction-bait arts and crafts videos with no purpose because that’s what people have figured out will keep us staring long enough to get through their video.

I try to ask myself if I’m actually enjoying this and disengage the moment I realize I’m not, but I also close the damn thing just to realize I have it back open again a couple hours later.

That’s the difference. That’s why it’s sinister. It’s why social media in general is sinister, even Lemmy. Because even after you close the window half the time you just open it right back up again. That’s the loop.

I don’t remember that being the case back in the days of YTMND and Newgrounds and all those old sites. I’d look at some stuff and then move on and look at some other stuff. Not close the window and then go right back to looking. And nobody was fighting to keep my eyes locked into their shit as long as possible. If anything, there was a ton of weird countercultural stuff that didn’t care at all if I looked at it, or even actively worked to make itself unpalatable.

Not as engagement bait, but as anti-art. As crazy surrealist or dadaist nonsense. As experiment and unfettered expression.

These two things are not the same.

Just make vi.

God knows what disease contracted from a couch Vance is walking around with.

Hah, no. It’s in the felt art style, but not in your protruding eyeballs unix surrealism style (as much as I love it). Though I might throw in a reference or two somewhere if you’re up for it.

It’s a dialogue-centric RPG with a lot of retro point-and-click adventure influence. But it is post-apocalyptic, and it does include some post-human animal looking people and fantasy-creature-adjacent characters.

I would play the shit out of a Techno-Mage game, though.

Thanks! I’m making a game in the style, soooo at the moment I’m keeping the details a bit under wraps. But I’ll post about it here (on SDF and Lemmy in general) once it’s out and may be more forthcoming then!

GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I’ve found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.

I don’t know why people hate on it so much. It’s all about using the tools you’re comfortable with.

JK Rowling is definitely totally harmless, though, and we’re all obligated to separate the art from the artist, and the populatity of Harry Potter has literally nothing to do with her social clout or ability to push her ideology.

This headline is bullshit. The correct headline would be “Americans now face 245% Trump tariff on Chinese goods”. No need to spread misinformation about how tariffs work.

Honestly, this is what blocking is for. Sure, it’s useful for toxic or obnoxious people, but it’s also useful for people who make a mess of your feed consistently.

As promised. One soft fish.