What feature is missing from KBin or Lemmy to make them forums? KBin superficially looks like a forum, but I only just got here. My next step is to find out whether Lemmy devs are tenable people to work with on forum software development. They are Marxist-Leninists and run a M-L instance or two, it seems. I’m a socialist but not M-L and I’ve got run out of plenty of “tankie” subs on Reddit, so I’m worried about that. I don’t enjoy being called liberal or a bootlicker.
Absolutely agree. One of many reasons I’ve never bought anything on Steam, is Steam infects games with their Steam software. You don’t get the game “plain”. You get the game totally dependent on what Steam does with it. Like not running on an old machine anymore.
GOG gives me a backup of the game installer that has no GOG at all in it. I can save that backup to a DVD as an archive. Yes I do own the game, independent of GOG. I can get it to work, anywhere that it can be made to work. That might be easier or harder depending on where I try, but I can do it. I can do it 20 to 40 years from now if I remember to copy my DVDs, keep them alive, don’t get them burned in a house fire, don’t lose them, etc.
“forum”. It’s correct. Short for web forum. Social media forum if you really want to get picky.
I dunno, the Ferengis are neighbors and they’re damn greedy.
The Centauris I hear are pretty nice.
Reddit is also turning into this weird police state lately about NSFW vs. SFW sub designations. Where which standard gets applied, is about whether you recently changed anything during protests. Wouldn’t be entirely shocked if someone could get caught in a new round of hyper-vigilance. Not that I even bothered to read the OP’s claims or links. I don’t care and it doesn’t matter.
My mental image of Reddit corporation and admins right now is all these Dilberts running around into tables in a conference room. Maybe like a pinball machine.
Serious answer: so what?
Flippant answer: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…
Migration is a real world metaphor. You think maybe there were some migrants who did it under duress?
“DAYOM there was this gang chasing me over the border of El Salvador and they had guns and they were gonna kiiil mee help me pleeeeez…”
I dunno with the prison industrial complex in the USA, I could clown this all night. “WHA I dinna doo anythin’ wron!” “Sure you did BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM”
“You see you’re not really allowed to migrate unless you’re especially wealthy, especially educated, especially white, especially in worldview…”
Mechanized greater amalgamation carries a presumption of agreement and agreeability. This is not what I experienced on Reddit.
For instance there was r/gamedesign. It had serious problems of people staying on topic, and lesser but recurring problems of people becoming most uncivil. I started r/GamedesignLounge in opposition to this. I “ruled” with a firm hand unfamiliar to Reddit users, but quite to old guard Usenetters. All posts and comments required moderator approval. I would have been perfectly happy to share this in a double-blind comoderator system where I don’t approve my own posts, but such a mechanism doesn’t exist on Reddit. All subs are run by the “Lord of the Manor”. I was a nice, disciplined LotM and my job primarily consisted of hitting Approve. The fact of requiring people to adhere to the rules up front, rather than waiting for people to offend and be dealt with later, definitely elevated signal-to-noise ratio.
But I got no members and no surfacing. The incumbent name that anyone would look for, “gamedesign”, is already owned by someone else with critical mass. Opposing such a de facto group with “better moderation ideas” is pretty much impossible on Reddit.
Another example is the TV show fan sub r/TheOrville vs. r/USSOrville vs. r/OrvilleVSTrek . The last one died. The 2nd one is barely alive. I’ve refused to participate in the 1st, in solidarity with the 2nd and 3rd. Nobody cares though.
For awhile, there was only one r/vikingstvshow about the series “Vikings”. I don’t know about now; don’t care. Turned out it was not for fans of Vikings really! It was more for people to hurl rocks at Vikings and say this sucked, that sucked. Mods were totally down with that and fairly negative about the show. Somehow there weren’t enough Redditors interested in Vikings to support multiple subs about it, so the one dominated by negative leaning mods, ruled the roost. Anyone who actually liked the show, after getting the barrage of pissing and moaning over and over again, pretty much you packed up your stuff and went home after awhile.
In the case of Game of Thrones, there were enough people to support quite substantial, separate subs with very different moderator policies. And the different communities mostly hated each other. Tons of institutional inertia accrued to the sub that first managed to grab the “Game of Thrones” name though.
I got banned from r/CobraKai. I got a little wound up about what would really happen in the modern USA, if you had some karate jackass kicking you in the head on some beach somewhere, like in the original The Karate Kid. Someone would probably pull out a gun from their glove compartment and blow the other away. That’s fact, in the real world. Happens all the time. Happens between 12 to 15 year old kids in my city. Makes the newspaper headline regularly. Well that’s just too negative and toxic to be saying in the sub for some reason, so I get banned.
What if I want to go talk about this show somewhere else, where having a real sense of real world violence, and making comparisons to the fantasy world of the show, is ok? Not that CobraKai material is itself at fault here. They did their juvenile detention episodes. Its the heavy handed mods that were the problem, not the show. Well, r/CobraKai is reaping all these incumbent advantages of traffic shaping, having the name of the show.
So far from wanting to consolidate communities, I am thinking communities should not be allowed to monopolize valuable brand names for community participation. I’d like to think that “Game of Thrones” could have at least 5 different communities, all with “Game of Thrones” technologically part of their community name. I haven’t really thought through what the differentiator would be… the most trivial default designator would be a number. You might be on GOT 1, someone else might prefer GOT 2. Others prefer GOT 4. GOT 5 decided “5” wasn’t doing them any mindshare good, so they change it to the non-default “GOT - Icicles” or some such. But GOT would be a way that you quickly found all such groups, when searching.
This could admittedly lead to a long list of GOT groups, like 200 of them, and games to see how you climb to the top of such a list. But it might actually be a better circumstance, than just ceding all this valuable word territory, to whoever had the luck of first starting with the most obvious name.