The internet’s fine - the web’s the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, ‘make good art’, write and share good content, don’t feed the machine. Sounds like you’re doing that already if you’re on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren’t all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT…download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It’s a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work

It’s this button.

Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc,

Checkboxes:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/uploads/short-url/biHcqD9rpmk0V92ShVFWZwDVIUD.ods

Something new with Calc? Not to my knowledge, though I’ve never found something I couldn’t do. What additional features do Google Docs have?

For online-usage, nothing will ever beat spreadsheets. They exist to crunch numbers and compare values. They work with both text and numbers. And they’re flexible.

• Want to add +2 to perception for elves? Check if race = "Elf" and if so, add +2.
• Want to add a fixed list of weapons for the player to choose from? Stick the entire list on a secret sheet, then reference them in a drop-down menu.

If a bespoke tool ever came out, it would only do one system, badly. Spreadsheets do any system, and the skills you learn with them are transferrable to almost all other spreadsheet programmes.

There’s my indie RPG character spreadsheet (requires Libreoffice Calc). Fill in your name, and it’ll use numerological constants to find your race and stats, then tracks your XP every time you buy a skill.

People want to use something like a pdf because it looks like paper, but this instinct is wrong. PDFs are for printing. Their fill-in text boxes are ugly, and programming them is clunky.

The apps are certainly in need of all the help they can get. I have Lemur and Jerboa, and they’re both janky as all heck.

My game has fewer rules than Pathfinder by any measure, although ‘a page or two’ seems a very low number - that sounds more like a little zine than a fully-fledged RPG.

I like this idea, but given that players never read the rules, it’s a little like asking my granny what kind of package management system her computer should use.

Upon stepping into the room, the players are ambushed (see the core rules for ambushes) by a drow mage (see the Monstrous Manual for more on the drow) riding a Grizwoz (see Appendix B: New monsters). The drow is level 7 (the GM should prepare a spell-list before the adventure starts).

About 50% of what I read online is just RSS. For cli fans, newsboat lets you extend the RSS feeds really easily. So far, I have:

• gemini translation, to get gemini feeds, and a hotkey to open them.
• a hotkey to open things in w3m (most articles work fine in the terminal, many are easier to read)
• a hotkey to open youtube videos
• another to download them and watch later

Haggis whiskers are similar, but quite rare nowadays.

One of the greatest joys of federation, is de-federation.

Kbin is very young software. The dev was doing really well, then /u/spez dumped 10-bajillion users on it. I’m surprised the servers are still operating.

Lemmy’s a lot more mature, but it’s never been tested with this kind of traffic. It’s impressive that any of these sites are still going. I’d give it at least another month until things settle, adjustments are made, instances update, et c. et c.

An art instance is a brave move. Lemmy takes up a lot of disk space already, but encouraging images means a lot more disk space. Lemmy also allows multiple images per post.

I don’t think anyone can tell where we’re going. Mastodon.social was the largest instance by far for some time, then at the deluge, it splintered.

Part of the reason for Mastodon to fracture is specialization - each instance does something unique. Maybe Lemmy will do the same, maybe not.

But if we end up with 3 primary instances, it’s still decentralized - I think the most useful feature of Lemmy isn’t that we’re spread out, it’s that we could be.

More like a teenager with their first job.

This week, Lemmy becomes a man.

In all fairness to the devs, Lemmy’s had a dozen users + the devs until now, then /u/spez pulls his stunt, and we’re looking at how it operates with 0.0000000000001% of Reddit, which is apparently 20-bajillion people.

The features sound good, and judging by Lemmy, I imagine they’re coming, depending on how much free time the devs have.

there’s no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com

This one’s trickier. The mods have mentioned both moderation and legal difficulties with nsfw instances. If something illegal’s posted, then whoever has the server would (verifiably) have a copy of that image and has been (verifiably) distributing it. Reddit probably managed to skirt these issues by a) being early, when the world was new, and laws were weak, and b) having the money for a legal team.

I wouldn’t want to be an admin trying to answer legal questions.

What I most from Reddit, is the communities there. Nobody can nuke that - if Lemmy.ml disappears, those groups will have (or make) copies elsewhere.

I don’t think anyone follows me on Reddit, but if I followed people, I guess they’d re-emerge soon after. Of course that’s not great if you follow 100 people - Mastodon’s much better at retaining that sort of thing.

There’s a Github issue about it here.

There’s a lot to answer on what exactly that would mean. Would you be able to edit old posts from the new instance? What if the new instance already defederated from the old? Would you retain the same username? Or are you simply getting a list of subscriptions, and copying them across?

Users are unable to block whole instances

Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a ‘disadvantage’, without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?

Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly service I have ever stumbled upon

Could you expand on this? Is it just the deletion problem?

There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon),

This took a while to get on Mastodon. Remember, the data’s not necessarily stored in a usable format (users don’t want a load of postgres in their download), and the devs need to be sure that nobody else’s data will accidentally get in there.