Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.

Going off the headline alone makes me think of when the idea of putting cosmetic patches on things felt cool. Personally I still think it’s cool, maybe others do too, I dunno.

Anyway, repairing things is cool whether it’s electronic or cloth!

It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.

I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.

Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

I don’t think so. The largest ask communities, according to their own descriptions, say they’re for more open-ended questions, albeit AskLemmy@lemmy.ml seems to be more lax about it (and it seems like maybe AskLemmy@lemmy.world has kinda relaxed on it too).

There’s the newer !ask@lemm.ee that doesn’t have the open-ended part to their description, so might be a good fit.

Haven’t played it (probably in my wishlist), so I can’t help directly, but I can offer this: go ahead and ask the questions. If someone else around here has, then they can jump in to comment with advice and answers at any point in time later.

One of the perks of forum-style comms like this.

Yes. Alongside what others have mentioned, I think a couple factors are context oversight (in part from context collapse at times) and subsequent fumbling of code switching.

Many primarily comment in news or politics threads (see front pages with sort set to Active) or otherwise more serious communities, so I think it carries through in their other interactions elsewhere. It’s something of a bummer because generally neither party to fumbled interactions feels good about it.

[…] I really don’t see gamers ever embracing AI.

They’ve spent years training to fight it, so that tracks.

Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.

It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.

Ubisoft cannot complain when gamers “pirate” their games then.

If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft and all that.

Also if you don’t want to manually switch it all the time, go into your account settings and change the sort type to whatever you prefer. Similar should apply in apps, with a bonus: some apps will let you change default comment sort setting as well.

Meant to comment this earlier. On your last point so far as I’m aware there’s currently no way to create a link post (direct URL lemmy link as you say) from Mastodon/microblog to Lemmy. The reason your test post is linking back to the Mastodon instance is because of the image attachment, because you can create image posts between the two.

If you drop the image attachment, while it won’t look as nice, you can get the separate title, link, and body text without it looking too bad. Unfortunately it will lose the visual draw in the process, but that seems to be the workaround for the time being.

Efforts like this always have me split. On one hand I appreciate them keeping old media going, on the other I wish their efforts would go towards an open source clone/variant instead of propping up a neglected property from a giant company.

Especially when said company could abruptly change with different management and start trying to shut down their activities.

It may not do much depending on the mods/admins, but it never hurts to report and downvote comments or posts like that.

Emphasis on reporting there, as I think sometimes that stuff lingers around because people have made a habit of only downvoting and blocking those doing that regularly. I realize in your examples it’s more likely bias or bigotry respectively, but still.

Report first, then downvote and block. Doing only the latter only makes your experience a little better, the former may help the community.

For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.

The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.

In other words, vibe coders are today’s technologically accelerated script kiddie.

That’s arguably worse as the produced scripts may largely work and come with even less demand for understanding than a script kid’s cobbling together of code may have demanded.

If you look around some automotive sections of stores they now have glasses specifically for headlights while night driving. I haven’t tried them so I can’t speak to their efficacy but worth keeping an eye out for if you want to try them.

These look nice! The fifth one to the right of the tallest walking stick is surprisingly straight. Almost looks like it could double as a fighting staff.

OpenRSS is a cool site that aims to produce RSS feeds for sites without them at no cost (some conditions apply, e.g. no account-walled/paywalled sites may be requested).

There’s also the Feedbro add-on for Firefox (and other browsers) that can be used to check if a website has a RSS feed buried somewhere to add to your reader.

If you’d like to keep up with some non-commercial music, you could check out the Editor’s Picks from ccMixter. Here’s the direct feed link.

In case of follow-up questions:

• Mobile Apps: personally I’m mostly using Feeder on Android these days. I like to be able to see a lot of feed entries at once and this works best for me. I’ve tried apps like Read You and Nunti, but they weren’t showing as much as I wanted.
  • Worth noting though, Nunti may be worth trying for its unique feature that tries to adjust your feeds to surface articles/entries that may be of more interest to you with offline systems.
• Desktop/laptop: I’m still sort of searching on this one. For the moment I use Thunderbird, but it’s not RSS-focused so it’s more than I want from a reader.