There’s always Diablo 1.

But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It’s an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today’s standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

I agree that the double @ is off-putting.

Absolutely. Capitalists are mad dogs. You are never ever safe with them. I like the Fediverse. I’d like to see it improved by becoming fully democratic and publicly funded.

I’d like to know, too! Can we even swear here?

But isn’t squabbles owned by a single company? I thought I heard that. So the same thing will probably end up happening there.

No, I signed up for Mastodon long ago. Didn’t get a ton of use out of it, but I posted there occasionally. I’ve had too many platforms bought out from under me and turned to crap, so the idea of the fetaverse appeals to me. Okay, the fetaverse was invented by Android voice dictation. I invite everyone to come up with their own ideas of what that Greek cheese-based universe might be like. 😆

But I’ve gotten far more into the Fediverse In the last two or three days then in the previous 59 years. I’ve set up Lemmy, kbin, and BookWyrm accounts. I know they can all theoretically connect, but I don’t know how to do it yet.

I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.

That really should be built into Lemmy.

You pretty much have it. Magazines on kbin and communities on Lemmy (same thing, as I understand it) are subreddits to all intents and purposes. But there are multiple ones, or similar ones, broken out all across the fediverse (which for some reason Android voice dictation wants to spell “fetaverse”; that definitely has comical possibilities!).

If you’re subscribed to one of those communities, you’re not connected to any of the others. So the total number of people who are interested in that topic are all split out from each other across the fediverse into relatively small groups.

You could search out the equivalent groups across the Fediverse and subscribe to each of them. But those communities and users would still be all split apart from each other. Readers of books on lemmy.ml won’t see or be able to respond to posts on books on Beehaw.org unless they all go and subscribe separately to that beehaw community. So basically the whole community of interest is fractured.

Now, perhaps one of those communities will come to dominate all the others just in terms of popularity, and everyone will end up joining that one. It’s possible. But I’m not sure that most instances could handle that kind of traffic. The ideal solution would be some way to merge communities of similar interest, or link them, or something. But these are early days yet, so maybe that’s something that will be accomplished later.

We’re not going to see massive communities like there were on Reddit for a long time, if ever. There are advantages to that, but also some big disadvantages.

It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.

So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That’s very limiting.

Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

Haven’t yet. I’m going dark when everyone else does, and I will uninstall the Reddit app when my third party app stops working. But there are some things that I can’t do on Lemmy, and don’t expect to be able to do for quite a long time - not until the user base is much larger.