Barbarian

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

Just so people are aware, Kbin users will not see your comments or get your votes.

If you comment on a Kbin post, only other users on sh.itjust.works will see it. We are effectively defederated due to this bug. This affects all instances on 0.18.0, as far as I understand it.

This sub seems to be very western EU focused, so putting in a video about life here in the east seemed fun and interesting. Happy to answer any questions about life on this side of the continent.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/508825

This was an experienced group, and had been through quite a few runs by this point. After many runs working up the ladder, they'd managed to piss off all the local cops in Seattle, which was a perfect hook to pull them into the London Falling campaign. After that, they'd worked for most of the major corps by this point, so I wanted to do something in South America with Aztechnology.

As a starting point, I ran a wetwork run. Nothing too crazy for this group at this stage of development. Get in to a AA corp HQ, kill a high-level executive, get out. What I wanted to happen is that they'd talk to an NPC in the room clearly signalling that she was impressed and wanted them to do a job for her.

Oh boy, never count on your players to act rationally. They do the job pretty much as expected: decker gets into the security systems, face gets them through the front door, street sam sniper set up on the building across the road, and they finally get to the point where they can open the bulletproof windows for support fire as they go for the target.

Face & mage go into the room, bullshit a bit with the target about some computer troubles, data tap goes on, decker opens the glass, target goes down. The NPC says she's impressed with the work and wants to give them a commlink number, maybe they'll call it if they want some higher pay.

I barely get out "Impressive..." before the player playing the street sam says "I take the shot".

"What shot?"

"The shot on the witness"

"Hey, just giving you a heads up here as the GM, she's offering you a..."

"Don't care, I'm taking the shot. She's a witness."

So, they excavate the brain cavity of the connection to this big campaign I had planned in South America, and had to sit down and re-do most of the setup for it.

Maybe it's my fault? I can't exactly blame my players for being paranoid after instilling it into them xD

Even though this song isn't exactly new and everyone who calls themselves a hiphop head knows who Aesop is (regardless of whether you like his music or not), I thought I might as well post one of my fav tracks from my fav artist.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/336160

I'm only including the overall review, not the chapter-by-chapter breakdown because I hit Lemmy's character limit twice, and I cba to split it into multiple sections again. Just click the link above if you want to see the full breakdown.

TL;DR: The book is overall pretty good. It's not a literary masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but the chapters that work, work really well. There are also chapters that are awful, and you should just straight-up ignore. There are also some very questionable editing decisions that mean you have to cross-reference things across both ends of the book, but this is something that can be overcome by taking notes and assembling a timeline yourself. This started as a review, but ended up being more of a GM guide on how to use the book. I hope nobody minds terribly.

Overall, this book is really all over the place. Some terrible editing decisions, an awful chapter that should have never made it past the draft stage, and some questionable organizational decisions, but the chapters that work really work. I think it’s well worth it just for the Detroit Rupture/Detroit Now and UCrASh chapters. There’s lots of potential shadowruns here, and if the official timeline is too tight and you want your players to see more of this important moment in UCAS history, you can always tweak the timeline yourself to lengthen or shorten it. I really do think there’s a lot of value in this book, but it is a bit of a slog to get to it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827

Hello! Friendly neighbor over at sh.itjust.works popping in to lend a hand. Here's a very useful set of instructions and tips that have been floating about, I hope you find it useful too.

You can ignore the "How to Join Lemmy" part if you're already happily set up on pathofexile-discuss.com, but the rest'll still be useful.

(These instructions are for using Lemmy in a browser. If you are using an app, some steps may differ.)

How to Join Lemmy

To use Lemmy, you need to be a member of one instance from the list at https://join-lemmy.org/instances. You will still be able to see content from anywhere, but the instance you choose will determine:

• What URL you use to log in to Lemmy,
• What content shows on the homepage when you select "Local" or "All",
• Who moderates your instance, and
• What rules you agree to when you sign up.

Choose an instance that matches your interests, language, and region. (If you want more information about an instance, you can tap its "Join" button, which will show you its current homepage in the main view and its description in the sidebar. You can also check the tables here and here.) Please avoid joining instances that are already crowded (1K+ users/month). If an instance gets overcrowded, it can start running slowly or experiencing downtime, so choosing an uncrowded instance will give both you and others a better Lemmy experience.

Once you have decided on an instance, tap its "Join" button to open it and then tap "Sign Up" in the upper-right corner. Fill out the form and wait for your account to be approved.

When your account is approved, log in and customize your profile and settings. If you change your language settings, select "Undetermined" in addition to any languages you speak so that you can still see posts and comments that are not tagged as being in any particular language.

How to Find and Subscribe to Communities

There are four ways to find communities through Lemmy:

1. To browse communities that others in your instance are already subscribed to, tap the "Communities" tab at the top of the page and choose the "All" scope. Tapping on a community name will open it through your instance.

2. To browse communities across all instances, visit https://browse.feddit.de/. Tapping on the community's name will open it, but probably not through your instance (in which case the page will say that you are not logged in). Instead, follow these steps:

   a. Copy the community's URL or remote name. You can use the copy button next to the community name, you can open the community outside your instance and copy the URL from your address bar, or you can open the community outside your instance and copy the remote name (which will look like [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])) from the sidebar.

   b. In your instance, tap on the "🔍 Search" button in the upper toolbar.

   c. Make sure that you have chosen "All" for each of the four filters: "Type", "Scope", "Community", and "Creator".

   d. Paste the community's URL or remote name into the search field and tap "Search".

   e. One of the results should be the community shown as an icon, a name, and a subscriber count. If you do not see it, or it is buried too deep in the search results, try changing "Scope" to "Local". If that does not work, you may need to wait a bit and try again.

   f. Tap on the community in the search results to open it in your instance.

3. If you want an experience similar to Reddit's r/all, visit https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/1, which aggregates from these communities as described here. As in Option 2, you can copy and search for a community's URL to open it in your instance and subscribe to it.

4. If you don't see a community by browsing, subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/findacommunity and make a post about what you're looking for.

Once a community is open in your instance, subscribe to it by tapping on the "Subscribe" button at the top of the sidebar. It will then appear in the "Subscribed" section of your "Communities" tab, and its posts will show on your home feeds.

Can't find a community you're looking for? If your instance allows it, you can create the community yourself by tapping "Create Community" in the upper toolbar.

The simple version of that wall of text is if you're the first person on your instance to subscribe to a community:

1. Get the URL (for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy)

2. Go to the Communities page

3. Search for that URL

4. Change all search options to "All" (even "Communities")

5. Click the federated link it gives you (for example, https://pathofexile-discuss.com/c/[email protected])

6. Click subscribe

Also, there's a new project for finding communities across instances! lemmyverse.net is a REALLY cool and easy way to find communities that you might want to subscribe to!

A crazy sci-fi tale about alternative facts and belief systems

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

We've been defederated. Were there that many trolls/assholes on our server? What on earth happened while I was asleep?

hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

• these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
• the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
• our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
• and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.