cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1672667

Hello and thanks for the interest, I've been running a weekly cyberpunk roleplaying game for hexbear users for over a year now, and I'm looking for new people to join a heist/anti-corporate aktion/criminal syndicate intrigue campaign.

The current system is Shadowrun 5e and I can provide all the information to play the game on Roll20 the web-based tabletop simulator we use to play and utilize discord for voice. We'll build a character together to join the existing group of:

Mafia Orcish Gun-guy Ex-corporate Human Medical Mage Ex-corporate Elven Infiltration Mage Shadowy Human Drone Operator

We are looking for one to two people to join us on Sundays for three hours starting at 8:00PM CET / 2:00PM EST

Please leave a comment or send a DM if interested or have any questions

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1063911

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/339101

Hey there we have been playing now for a couple months and have a spot, currently 5 players (myself and 4 PCs) and like to do around 5-6 PCs so that we can always play even if a couple are unavailable. Currently we have a Mafia gunguy, a sword guy, a medical magician, and an infiltration oriented magician.

We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from lemmy with the exception of a single person.

I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character.

I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character.

We use discord for voice, and have a simple server dedicated to this

Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me.

Thanks!

https://lemmy.world/post/4470706

Rent free

Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier

Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit.

1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking

There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this:

Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.

This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.

2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance

I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.

Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.

With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be.

While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.

3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature

Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.

So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.

Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.

Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.

🏳️‍⚧️

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/339101

We started off playing Cyberpunk Red and are just now trying out Shadowrun 5E

We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from hexbear with the exception of a single person.

I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character.

I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character.

We use discord for voice, and while we do have a home-server we have been using a group message/call for playing.

Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me.

Thanks!

Full now, thanks for the interest!

We started off playing Cyberpunk Red and are just now trying out Shadowrun 5E

We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from hexbear with the exception of a single person.

I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character.

I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character.

We use discord for voice, and while we do have a home-server we have been using a group message/call for playing.

Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me.

Thanks!

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure of my personal answer. I enjoy my time here, but I also see lots of opportunities for how things could be better. There have been some interesting projects this week of people working on structural improvements within the fediverse, on safety, testing and search. Plus, we take a look at how the Japanese side of the fediverse is doing.

Search, and the lack thereof, on Mastodon has been a hotly contested issue for a long time. There are some technical challenges with implementing search in a federated contest, but the main limitation has always been social: how do you make sure that you have consent of the people who you are indexing? One option is to take the setting ‘Discoverable’, which indicates that your profile can be found by search engines and other discoverability services, and take all the posts by accounts that use the (opt-in) setting Discoverable, and return all public posts by that account. This is the approach taken by a custom patch created by @vyr, which as been used on the Universeodon server for a while.

Now, Eugen Rochko has proposed a similar change for Mastodon proper (without mentioning the previous work by @vyr), stating “It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience.”

The definiteness of the statement, and the lack of discussion (Eugen Rochko closed the comment section soon after) as well as the implementation itself lead to quite a bit of discussion from the community. These responses got taken up upon, and a new implementation got proposed a few days later. The current proposal for search is to have two separate opt-in options, one for the discoverability of your profile, and one for the discoverability of your posts.

This seems like a fairly optimal outcome, with full granular control and opt-in to get people’s consent. The process to get there though is more of a mixed bag. The way it is implemented also indicates that Mastodon struggles with its role as a community leader; a significant group of long-term Mastodon users also has feelings that are at best ambivalent about how the Mastodon organisation is run. By not crediting earlier work by others, and making unilateral executive decisions about controversial topics without community input runs the risk of eroding community trust and support in the project.

Official announcement of the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP). The goal of the FSEP is “to reduce the administration burden for Mastodon admins, and increase safety for Mastodon users, by providing tools that will make it easy and convenient for admins and moderation teams to consistently discover harmful instances and protect their communities”. It is an interesting collaboration between multiple actors who are working on improving safety within the fediverse. Expect a more extensive report on this soon. For now, the proposal itself is worth reading.

The fediverse promotes interoperability between platforms and products and services via ActivityPub, but putting this in practice can be hard. For developers, there are scant little tools available to make sure that the product they are making is actually interoperable in practice. To help with this, the Social Web Incubator Community Group held a meeting about organising towards testing tools that developers can use to test is their platform is indeed interoperable with the other platforms. For non-developers who are interested in the fediverse, the most important takeaway is that for all its lofty ideals, getting full interoperability on the fediverse is really difficult. There is a lack of tools, documentation, but also knowledge of what tools actually are available is often lacking or hard to find. For developers, it’s worth checking the notes here, and the presentation by Johannes Ernst (@J12t)

The Misskey flagship server misskey.io reorganises themselves into a company, Nikkei Asia reports. Misskey continues to grow rapidly, especially in Japan. Misskey.io has recently restricted new signups to only people from Japan in order to be able to handle all the growth. I published a more extensive report on Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse this week, here.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA, and I wrote a report on the major themes in their answers, which you can read here. Much has been said about the political views of the developers, who explicitly identify themselves as Marxist-Leninist. What interested me was their views on software and the fediverse. And here they are surprisingly hands-off, something I did not expect beforehand. At some point they explicitly state that the fediverse “will grow whether we want it or not”, which surprised me, considering they developer the third most popular software on the fediverse. This gives them significant influence in whether and how the fediverse growth, but so far they seem reluctant to admit to this power.

Mastodon starts selling merchandise, with most of the items already being sold out again.

IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust And Safety, has written a blog post to introduce themselves, and launch another survey for a Needs Assessment.

Wired has posted an extensive description of how to migrate your posts from Instagram to Pixelfed.

Threads has added support for “rel=me” links, allowing you to verify your Threads account on Mastodon. The Verge has a simple guide on how to use this. What stands out is the comment by Threads developer Jessel, who says: “my hope is that folks take this as a sign that we’re embracing open standards seriously”.

Techmeme continues to add further support for the fediverse. They’ve linked to fediverse accounts as commentary for a while. Now it also links directly to their Mastodon post for you to comment, like or share, similar how it links to their post on X.

Lemmy held a Canvas event, similar to /r/Place on reddit, where people can place a pixel on a canvas every few minutes. Here is the final result.

Tweakers is one of the largest Dutch tech news website. They published an article on all Reddit alternatives, going in large detail on both Lemmy and Kbin.

An extensive wiki with practical guides for fediverse software.

A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.