The honest answer is that we’re still trying to get The Agora running, and a backlog developed in the process. We are working on it, it’s just going to take some time to sort through the old votes. We’ve been focused on cleaning up the process so we don’t have this problem moving forward.

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don’t love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone’s attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn’t caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I’m sure it’s something we’ll need to address internally, but it’s just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

If you want some really wild old storage tech, a normal VHS cassette could hold 3-5gb of data. But we didn’t have any use for that much storage at the time, and CDs were taking over by the time we did, so nobody bought the VHS storage hardware.

Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I’ve seen, anyway)

It’ll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I don’t even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn’t massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you’d think.

You can buy some at the grocery store, it says “Moon Cheese” right on the damn bag! They wouldn’t just lie about what they’re selling

And to make matters annoying, restarting the service that causes the sorting bug can trigger some other bugs (federation errors iirc). So there isn’t a “right” answer until the real fix comes.

If you want impressive, you have 4-6 seperate terminal windows that take up the whole screen collectively. The laymen assume you’re hacking the NSA or something if they see that.

Because of federation, I just didn’t think about it too hard. I clicked on Sh.itjust.works because the name made me giggle when I saw it, and signed up immediately because the first post I saw was the boss sharing server stats and being totally transparent about operations and intentions. At the time, it was one of the smaller instances that might not last.

Choosing “wrong” never seemed like a big deal, it’s not hard to start fresh somewhere else if needed.

Counterpoint: being able to drink a cup of coffee then immediately take a nap leads to the most restful 20 minutes of sleep you’ll ever have.

Sure I’d rather be affected normally by caffeine, but at least it isn’t a total wash.

9 was even worse for that, every fight drags on for ages. It’s the only one I struggle to replay.

For 8, it’s generally best to avoid combat anyway because of the way level scaling worked. Enemies get stronger much faster than you do, even with good junctions. And it seems like the devs knew this a, since Diablos is available so early and built for low-level play. It lets you reduce or eliminate random encounters (and very cheaply), lets you refine status magic that comes in handy at low levels, and its attack has great utility against hard targets.

The slower fights aren’t as big of a deal when you aren’t doing as many of them, they feel more “cinematic” instead.

Multiple lists. Short-term, medium-term, long-term, “maybe eventually”. If one of them starts to feel like too much, I can kick some things down to the next one.

They’re also kinda based on how much focus will be needed to complete things, not just how important or time-sensitive things are. The medium/long lists are mostly stuff for “good brain days”.

Lemmings is fun, but it also has decades of being used as an insult to contend with. I do hope it catches on, but I’m trying to stick to the boring/generic “users” until then.

You’d think that, but we’re solidly in the “second tier” of popularity. Last I looked we were something like 5th most active users, 8th most total users among instances that are making that data available.

The additions throw off some dyslexic readers too, I’ve always had an even harder time reading purpose-built dyslexia fonts. Comic mono is top tier for me, it still looks stupid but the readability is incredible.

Especially true when the name of the instance in question is exactly what people are going to be punching into a search. They got in on the ground floor, they’ll be just fine.

It’s a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we’re looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for the primary.

I think the other way around is more likely. Their users having normal access in and out, but outsiders having limited access to Meta content. Going for the “exclusive club” vibe and making the users feel “special” will keep most of them in the garden.

YT ReVanced has Sponsorblock built in, it can skip those ads for you. It is community-run though, somebody has to have watched it first to flag that segment.

That said, I usually let those run to support the channel. The creators aren’t making much from standard ads, but I’ll watch the ones they actually get paid for.