planish

Thanks CatGPT

git commit -am "Fix everything" && git push origin main

Such dramatic lighting!

I think it is currently growing, as in more people will visit tomorrow than did today, but also it has shrank since a couple weeks ago when everyone was hyping it up as a reddit alternative and trying it out. Not everyone who came to try it has stayed.

I don't see a way out of this other than refactoring until #2 isn't true.

#1 isn't really problem; a text adventure needs a lot of written text, but you can keep the actual programming limited in scope and just sit down and write the text. Think of simple Twine games where all you can do is move from page to page but it's still a full game because there's a book or a short story's worth of text in there. Compare the text adventures that limit their parsers to two-word commands like talk guard, versus the ones that expand in scope to make sense of ask guard about bell, book, and candle. One is way easier to code than the other.

This ties back into how you absolutely need to fix #2. You can get away with not using something like Inform or Twine or TADS to make a text adventure, but then you really do need your own data-driven engine to do what those systems give you for free in terms of simulating an object physics and a room map and the connections between them. You do not want a bunch of switch(room_number); you want structs or on-disk files or macros that let you define the rooms and objects and so on in one place, and then you want a bunch of code for parsing commands and interacting with the room and object databases in a different place. Even if you don't want to write a Z machine game, learn about how the Z machine or other similar systems work under the hood, how they model game worlds, and generally why they chose their solutions to the design problems you are also going to face.

#3 is the underlying cause of #2 and will resolve on its own. There really is nothing that helps you develop a good design sense like the fear that comes with having had several prior projects collapse when you lost the ability to keep track of everything you put in them.

I think Lemmy fetches a lot of thumbnails/embeds from the instance where the user who posted the post lives.

And a lot of Lemmy instances are on domains registered like yesterday, in TLDs that are rarely used by companies, and are extremely unpopular websites. You might be the first Bitdefender user to query them.

So Bitdefender sees that you went to one site and immediately started requesting a bunch of weird stuff from a domain you didn't visit, which nobody else has ever visited as far as they know, and which was registered yesterday out in the boonies of .space or whatever, and decides it must be evil since it's so dang weird and is exactly what would happen if you were being attacked via some kind of cross-site scripting hole.

It is a worrying trend nowdays to have security software decide that anything it doesn't know about must be evil. Even Windows will block you from running programs you download that it thinks nobody else has ever downloaded.

Like why wouldn't they backdate the accounts?

You can pretty much just start adding other instances. Most of them will federate with all comers, and manually ban any instances from federation that cause trouble.

And you don't exactly add the instances. Someone on one server subscribes to a community on the other, and the instances talk to each other to make that happen.

Never get into a malicious comply-off with a Redditor.

We probably want all instances of substantial size to run under incorporated legal entities, because then there's a legal entity that can collect the donation money, be cooperatively owned, have a DMCA registered agent, get registered as a nonprofit, and so on. We don't want instance operators personally owing Nintendo a jillion dollars when they try and come for the Zelda memes or whatever.

I don't think the important line here is individual vs. legal fiction, it's whose interests (users vs. owners) the instance is set up to serve.

Another recommendation for Localsend. But it's cool that Snapdrop manages to do almost the same thing and does it in the browser. I can definitely see where it would be useful.

What's the point of self-hosting Snapdrop though? Does it need a discovery server in there for WebRTC? Or does this just end up serving the same static files but now from a local server?

I think it might seem like one can't unsubscribe from a local community because by default your feed is set to local communities and not subscribed communities, every time you visit the homepage. You can change this in settings.