Oh wow, that is quite literally the best game of all time. I dunno about the Steam version, how it changes things, but on the SNES the gfx suck, yet the story is so fantastic.

There should be a way to change the battle mode to “Wait!”, which will make them more trivially easy. Take a moment to go through one of the areas 2-3 times and you should be leveled up sufficiently to handle everything. But definitely pay attention to saves bc those boss patterns will need discovery if you aren’t using guides.

The early part is slow yeah, but once you see Lavos in the future iirc it perks quite a bit up. You will miss a LOT without a guide, but no need to even worry bc there’s like 13+ different endings and you can make use of a previous one to jumpstart the next game in the New Game+ feature.

Some doors cannot be opened earlier on. Either keep a record of them or consult a guide and much, MUCH later on they’ll hold cool stuff.

This one can be really short, and even if you level up your characters (which you don’t really need to, especially if you limit yourself to only use the ones that you think you’ll want to keep and set the others aside, only using as carriers of medical herbs and perhaps to take a bit) it still is short. Plus each battle is short, so it’s a good candidate if you don’t have so much time right now, very unlike the vast majority of RPGs.

Shining Force is putting me to sleep. But… that’s why I wanted it, so it’s good? (-ish:-D)

Before that I played Shining in the Darkness (I made a post about it to help that community get started, although it is too highly specific so I don’t expect it will survive).

I wonder if I should follow up with Shining Force II, but I tend to not want to finish it. All the extra stuff you want to do to level up your characters just leads to really long battles and then you Egress and do it all again and again - it feels too gimmicky, rather than natural.

But Shining Force is so simple and easy and short and fun so that one I enjoy:-).

I for one hope that he goes back to what he seemed to enjoy the most: writing the code. Let someone else handle the admin duties, which he mostly abandoned anyway. We would get the non-Lemmy codebase enhanced, while he would get the fun of chasing his passion:-).

That is an excellent point - I so rarely went there but I thought I recalled that being my experience as well, and yet I wasn’t certain enough to say so. It really does mess with the stats if we are trying to use “server uptime” to compare between instances or Kbin vs. Mbin.

I believe it, but I already did not trust those numbers for a different reason - e.g. I abandoned my account there six months ago to come to where I am at now, so technically I have an account and yet I’ve been there like 6 times since then and commented or interacted fewer than that.

Still, the total user count represents a “high mark” that it had once reached, and the Mbins collectively still seem far away from that. But good point, b/c how many accounts are e.g. alts or deleted from Mbin successfully but from Kbin that request gets ignored.

“Activity” would be a better measurement. Down below in some of the other replies we looked into that, and I think technically Kbin.Social is still fairly active, more so than the Mbins, but overall the Mbins are obviously in a healthier state with fewer of these insanely long (weeks-long) outages.

Btw, in my link above (for “sick”), Ernst mentioned that:

The care of the instance will also be handed over.

So it looks like things will change at Kbin.Social regardless of his health & life issues.

And to be clear, hyper-focused isn’t “bad”, just not the same as someone wanting to join a more general-focused one.:-)

Thank you for sharing some of that back story.

But that page is for “Kbin”, not specifically “Kbin.social” which I note does not appear among the list of all Kbins already - https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list. So you don’t have to wait for tomorrow - it’s already too late to see its former traffic today.

Interesting: the Active Users Monthly (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats) for Mbin is 568, whereas that stat for Kbin was 2280. So even without including the extremely large Kbin.social (well… large in terms of total users, but obviously not active ones bc the service is down, which by definition precludes people being active on it:-), the suite of Kbin instances still seems to have ~4x more active users than the Mbin ones.

I would not have expected that, given the chatter about Mbin being exciting, and I wonder why - potentially historical precedence, if an older server simply has more traffic bc it was created first?

But obviously something more is going on with that data - i.e. & e.g. supermeter.social is reported to have the highest user count among the Kbins, but with only 736 total users, and if you add up all users from all 8 of those servers you get only about half of the 2280 “Active Users Monthly” figure - so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all? Otherwise something is very wrong with the extrapolation of “active users”, to be more than twice the total ones (one possibility… past active ones vs. a smaller current total of people who deleted their accounts rather than merely abandoned them by walking away without going to the trouble of deletion).

Which would make sense - the website is reporting numbers accumulated over time, and even though Kbin.social is down now, it was not always thus, and it seems it cannot discriminate the history in terms of active users (Kbin.social vs. some other Kbin server I mean).

But that does complicate - possibly even invalidates - trying to compare the non-Kbin.social Kbins vs. the Mbins, in terms of active users.

So leaving active users aside then, I note that the largest Mbin has a ~6-fold higher total user count than the largest Mbin server. Also there are 8 total Kbin instances (aforementioned not including Kbin.social bc it does not appear on that list today), vs. 23 total Mbin instances. It’s shaky, but it really does look like the Mbin instances seem healthier than the Kbin ones? (Again minus Kbin.social, which despite monthly active users seems by no means “healthy” to me?)

This ignores things like possible hyper-focusing on specific niche topics so a deeper look would involve how many communities are there, and perhaps traffic patterns like do people actually comment in those or is the server mostly just a base from which to access the Fediverse at large (which may not be a bad thing at all? just a bit different), etc.

According to that website, Kbin.Social has >10x more registered users (had? looks like it only counts accounts) than all Mbin servers combined.

At this point people need to stop being surprised - whether he is sick or whatever the cause, this is by no means a rare occurrence for that instance.

I would actually not go that far - I respect the devs enormously for having written the code and shared it with the entire world. If someone else wants to write new code - K/Mbin and Sublinks come to mind - then sure replace Lemmy for those instances that run that, but e.g. Lemmy.World is definitely a Lemmy and I’m okay with that.

I’m also okay with Fediverse - should I not be? I suppose an alternative is something that implements the ActivityPub protocol, but why not the Fediverse?

Basically I am okay with anything so long as people don’t stumble upon it unawares.

But I do see your point that we can’t just say that we are a Reddit knockoff, even though that’s literally what we are. It should be the start of additional description. So far I call it “social media” - where people share and talk, bc that seems about right. “Link aggregator” doesn’t do much for me, and suggests more of a purpose to read news stories rather than make our own posts.

I don’t go to Facebook, X, Instagram, or Reddit. Some people that I talk to irl also don’t follow social media. Why should they - what does it offer then? To those people I have been recommending Lemmy in the past, and now I don’t do that anymore. I would like to though.

Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.

And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.

Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it…), but indeed it would be better than now.

I would rather, instead of dividing between have vs. lack smartyness, focus on have vs. lack kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. Remember Reddit? (A half-joke bc although you just came from there more recently, some of us haven’t been for a year or more and are legit starting to forget, almost blissfully!:-)

I don’t mind talking to people all along the intelligence scale, but I do mind talking with people who engage in trolling behaviors. I will hang out with the humble uneducated plebes but I refuse to with their opposites. I am not phrasing it well but somewhere in here it gets complicated bc those scales overlap, as often the least intelligent behave as if they were somehow entitled to be treated as the most - e.g. Dr. Fauci gave the entire world a vaccine, but it was people who flunked or never took biology in the first place who are trying to block access to not only it but to simple masks. One side works to earn respect, the other does not yet not only demands equal treatment but somehow more than equal, and sometimes at the point of a literal gun. One side actually reads the Constitution of the United States, while the other side does not yet attempts to overthrow it regardless, bc they apparently know “better” how the country should be run than those who founded it.

So while I think that fascists should have a place they can talk - that’s just humane - I also do not want to be in that place. Their rights end where mine begin. So if (like I/we did to Reddit) that means that they win and therefore I have to leave, so be it - I will leave social media entirely if need be, before I compromise and enjoy watching people “dunk on” others. If it is X or bust, then I choose bust.

Or the less hostile but just as damaging form of this where people treat social media as a place for emotional venting rather than real conversations with real people. Those two are related bc just bc you can get away with doing something, bc you have that power/ability, does not mean that you should do it. e.g. one or maybe three comments like “^This” or “I also choose this guy’s wife” or “And my bow” etc. is fine but a hundred of them!? in a row, or even like twenty, is just too much. They speak, and therefore people cannot even listen anymore bc of the crowded noise from everyone else speaking.

Who sees the last ten posts to a community being “which android phone is the best these days” (no other details provided) and decides to add an eleventh to the group? Answer: people who are lonely and need someone to talk to, but don’t care about the rules of politeness, and are so self-centered that they want another post devoted entirely to themselves. Never mind the fact that there being so many of those drives people away who would have actually answered their question. They not only whisper but SHOUT into the void, and if the only way for me to have peace is to mute them, or not go to where people do that, then so be it. Their right to post such runs up against my right to not have to listen to it.

And maybe, for some anyway, their lack of etiquette is merely bc they are young? But whoever they are, their presence foretells the absence of the people that they will drive away. So you cannot simply increase tolerance infinitely in order to grow the size of the Fediverse, bc that works in opposition to people who refuse to tolerate the intolerant and inconsiderate. We cannot have it all there - one or the other is the best that could be achieved even in purely theoretical terms, much less making it happen irl.

In the past I have very much bought the content legally, by the normal means. The issue of giving to the creators directly I don’t know though.

I presume that would have security issues of its own:-), and this is just a guess but it might look more like traffic that some ISPs may want to ban, if implemented like that?

I haven’t done anything remotely piratey for decades but people say that there are forums that way. I’m not intending to conflate P2P with the likes of TOR that is merely one implementation of that, just saying that apparently the implementations exist.

Also it trends towards a more intellectual crowd, even if primarily in the technical sense. Simply having to pick an instance probably keeps away a lot of the people who could otherwise flood every single community with inane questions - i.e. ask other people to do their work for them rather than do a 10 second internet search on their own.

Oh that sucks. Tbf the entire concept of the Fediverse is an enormous security nightmare regardless: someone was telling me how a person could spin up an instance and share a picture also served up from their machine, then maliciously correlate the incoming IP addresses from the latter of people who viewed it vs. make interactions (voting or comments) in the former to identify you irl. But at least that takes some technical effort, and there seems no reason not to put additional obstacles up to make it harder.

Unfortunately the Lemmy developers seem to have little incentive to add features that are primarily for Westerners who e.g. don’t agree that an authoritian admin and/or mod is always correct regardless of the facts. And Westerners don’t seem in that much of a hurry to make alternatives - although K/MBin exists already and Sublinks is coming as well. If we want better, we would need to put in the work to make it happen.

It’s still a thousand times better than Reddit:-). Except I no longer recommend Lemmy to people that I meet irl - I can’t keep doing that in good conscience anymore, until there is an instance that defederates Lemmy.ml. Yes the new person could block many people and even whole instances, but it seems a little similar to recommending that someone use Arch Linux - like, really!? Hopefully the concept of the Fediverse will improve someday soon and I can do that once more, bc I really do want to.

People forced to by work:-P.

He tried to capitalize on the Rexodus, but iirc could not pick just one lane b/t “freedom” and intolerance of the intolerant - you can never have both. Interestingly the Fediverse is currently deciding the same thing, with some neat new tricks coming in v0.19.4 that should help.

Note to others: do not attempt to size the wig irl (unless it is worth the restraining order). :-P

Also, am I the only one here who thought this post might be about…?

(from SNL)