comfy

Oooh, I didn't know about the map enthusiasts one :)

Haha Xonotic is a blast to drop into, and the online community were great (partly because they want new players to stay ;), one even taught me how to properly use the grappling rope in CTF online mid-game. I'm more used to Call of Duty 'run-and-gun' gameplay than Halo or anything with more tactical movement, so someone experienced in this kind of game would have even more fun. It's worth pointing out that all the games I mentioned (and it's only partly coincidence) are Free and Open Source Software ("FOSS") which is community developed rather than commercially developed, similarly to Lemmy, Mastodon and others.

Alright here's a quick rant for you:

The SuperTuxKart situation is a bit annoying, in mid-2019, a large chunk of the core staff stood down or left, including the lead, the co-project leader for 10 years and the social media manager. Two new leaders were elected (Alayan and Benau), and in the next couple of years Alayan has apparently disappeared.

Benau is a good dev, but not a good people person. They often give trollish replies in the main chat room antagonizing people who are reasonably annoyed and then laughing at them, I've seen them call two different volunteers 'trolls' and alienate them, people who very obviously weren't malicious and did nothing but politely suggest actually useful and applicable improvements or contribute amateurish addons and ask why one wasn't approved. Add on top of that randomly posting Musk and Donald Trump reaction stickers constantly in regular conversation. And the icing on the cake is that they're too dismissive of suggestions to accommodate to artist who are less technically experienced. They'll accept merge requests if someone has volunteered and made those technical or documentation improvements ready to add, sure, but it's about a 0 on their priority list. And this isn't trivial, it's probably the critical important task: I've talked to an industry professional 3D artist and teacher who couldn't get the tools working and was unable to contribute after (allegedly, I don't know the details) not getting any help in the chat room. With the improvements later made by someone else to the tool setup process, this person probably would have made the major, much requested improvements they had set out to make (like the redesigned overworld map).

Now, look, Benau is a bit stressed handling more roles than they should have, and that probably doesn't help, but they're the lead decision maker for a lot of things and very active in the chat and feedback channel so they're important when it comes to people's impression and experience. It's toxic to behave like this in a room for a family-oriented game. I mean, it would be toxic for a FPS too, but I'd just expect better from this genre of game. And when you're a volunteer driven project, that can be enough to kill it. There's certainly lost potential when experienced artists leave.

Hah, this is the second "September" I've been through, and it's huge, but I think the eternal one will be the next one. At least a lot of people are learning that lemmy.ml isn't a neutral flagship instance; the hug of death may have been a blessing in disguise, encouraging people to spread to the other instances a little bit more.

Most people who have come over have been pretty good about the thing and tried to learn about the local culture instead of just inventing "reddit, but here" again, honestly, but it's just that the few troublemakers tend to be louder and argumentative.

I've never used kbin, so I can't give the answer for that. It might not even be possible yet.

I'd rather not, just because they have a spam problem which isn't under control yet, and we're talking NSFL spam.

I think so, it would be nice. It might also help to discover early when someone has made a redundant community (one that already exists on another instance) and let them know and see if they want to reconsider.

I'm not seeing the chart, did it not attach?

Hah, just a technicality. I like Matrix, but we won't be seeing any Matrix<->Mastodon interaction any time soon ;)

Huh, that's interesting that a chart included it, do you happen to remember which one?

PeerTube. I was getting really sick of Youtube, heard about it and went exploring.

By the way, Matrix, while it is a federated protocol, isn't part of the "Fediverse" (a word for federated software using the ActivityPub protocol [edit: and some others, see reply] , which are aimed towards social media rather than instant messaging)

This question is more suited to !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml - see rule 3

This post is better suited to !lemmy@lemmy.ml

Please consider moving this question to there instead, where staff are more likely to see it.

Wolfballs was an instance run by a USA right-"Libertarian". I want to say it was maybe the 4th largest instance, for a long time. It prided itself on being for free speech, and was from-the-start populated with topics like anti-vaccination, racism, anti-LGBT+, nationalism and all that rot. The owner would gloss over it with "we allow everyone, we're not bigoted, we fight hate speech with better speech", but their userbase clearly were, because that's what happens when you advertise in right-wing circles and attract people who who get kicked out of other websites for hate speech, revolting almost everyone but their in-groups. That's why most 'pure' free speech extremist forums just end up with (literal) Nazis, pedophiles and people so spammy or detached they can't even hold a conversation.

Naturally there was a lot of tension between them and the largely socialist userbase here, including a lot of trolls coming over just to raid, so eventually lemmy.ml and wolfballs defederated. I believe it was already defederated by a bunch of other instance, for obvious reasons, but I think the devs felt an obligation to try and make it work with the wolfballs admin, since they were a legitimate code contributor and seemed to honestly think civil co-existence was possible and mutually beneficial. They sincerely held liberalist ideas, it wasn't just a mask to feign civility like many racists do.

At the end of January this year, the admin announced the instance was closing (if you appreciate Content Warnings, I'd just avoid reading the comments). Among other things, they mention that they had sincere beliefs the place would be used by doctors and layers who felt professionally censored, and that they had assumed neo-nazis online were just joking to troll people and were dismayed to realize, yes, they are serious and do believe in the nonsense they spout. Probably doesn't help that the admin was in an interracial marriage.

Just to clarify, from what I remember wolfballs wasn't as close-knit as beehaw or lemmygrad are, despite being so large. The userbases didn't interact often, so the negative interactions made up a big portion of the few that were had. That's probably the only reason it wasn't defederated sooner.