DarbyDear @ DarbyDear @beehaw.org

He/Him, with a tendency to ramble on about any given topic.

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2 yr. ago

Definitely! The big reason I decided to join Beehaw after taking a look at what instances were available is because the focus here seems to be building that feeling of community more so than just replacing Reddit, and I've already been feeling it in the best way. It's almost like a return to the days of forums where there were actual conversations happening, and I've actually slowly started recognizing names and avatars as I poke around in different topics. I'm not sure what things are going to look like further down the line, but hopefully it keeps developing in the way it has been! I do think it will, for what it's worth, since the admins and mods seem to be on the same page and dedicated to keeping the momentum going in that direction.

Yeah, tapping into dopamine bursts to encourage activity is a great short-term solution, but I guess it was also foreshadowing into what Reddit would become. I'll take what I've seen here so far over the quick and easy hits any day; having a constant stream of bite-sized content to consume was wreaking havoc on my attention span and I didn't even realize it until I found myself having to stay focused on some of the longer conversations I've seen around Lemmy.

Honestly, having been around for the Voat exodus, that's pretty on-brand for the crowd that migrated there. It wasn't exactly the top minds that left because subs like /r/FatPeopleHate were banned.

Damn, I just looked it up and they shut down in 2020. Long story short, they went anti-woke, then went broke.

Yeah, I've noticed the same. I also don't really have the same feeling that replying in a post with a bunch of comments already on it is a waste of time - on Reddit, if a post had 100 comments on it then it was kind of pointless for me to add my voice because nobody would see it anyway. Here, I've actually gone through and responded to various comments and posts regardless. I think that's more of a "social norms/community culture" thing than a technological difference though. I mentioned my thoughts on what went wrong with Reddit elsewhere, but basically the way Reddit set things up led to the encouragement of low-effort popularity contest type replies so people would rush to get the highest-karma responses as quickly and easily as possible. There isn't an easy way to see someone's total score here though, so upvotes aren't really the focus and actual conversation can happen instead.

As someone who registered under Beehaw (and thus, a potentially biased party), Beehaw isn't exactly looking to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Reddit from my understanding. It's more looking to create an actual community, similar to how online communities were once upon a time. I don't foresee pro-Russia sentiment taking hold there (especially since they apparently defederated with Lemmygrad, which is where a lot of tankies live), but I understand the concern.

For what it's worth, the Socialism community is essentially a transplant of the subreddit /r/LeftWithoutEdge, which I would lurk from time to time while I was still on Reddit, and it was one of the few leftist subreddit where I didn't feel shunned for being a veteran. A lot of other leftist subreddits would do stuff like pre-emptively ban anyone who posted in a military subreddit, so I think Beehaw's Socialism community has a great foundation to work off of at the very least.

This is exactly it. They don't want freedom of speech, they want freedom from the consequences of their speech. They don't like that the people affected by their speech have a voice too, and that the hateful rhetoric they spew into the world is finally being pushed back on. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

It's unfortunate, but I think it's because in this specific instance, there is a clear and immediate impact on people's lives. Meanwhile, climate change is a gradual change over a longer period of time and a much larger area. Climate change also requires action beyond stopping visiting a website and actual cooperation among the entire human race. It's short-sighted, but it's also an example of how hard it is to get people to care about things that don't clearly and immediately affect them (see also: people who are militant homophobes until someone close to them comes out).

Definitely! Humans are a bunch of individuals with one of a nigh-infinite combination of thoughts and experiences, so even if people can come to an agreement on what an abstract term means, there's still a high chance that there is some minor aspect where they have a slightly different understanding on the matter. Admittedly, I don't know for sure what it's like for vampires and Barovian nobility, but I have a feeling it's a similar case ;)

Although titles and classifications can feel restricting and gatekeep-y, I think it's also important to acknowledge their value when it comes to relating and communicating with other people that might be in the same situation. Even in this post, there are people who have mentioned going through the bi-cycle. It can be a lot less scary and confusing for someone dealing with it if they go online, say "is it normal to flip between what genders you're attracted to?" and then getting a veritable chorus of people saying that it's not only normal, but also has a name.

Of course, then you might also wind up stuck wondering if you really are bisexual because you've never had that experience (which I've also seen and tried to help someone through), so it's definitely a double-edged sword... In the end, gender and sexuality are messy and hardly ever as easy as some crowds want to claim, but that's a realization that I think each individual needs to get to themselves. Trying to force it on others just threatens defensiveness and shutting down communication.

I think you make a good point with the persistent karma score. Basically, Reddit is a site that has gamified popularity to the point where everyone is trying to make the quick, easy joke or reference as quickly as possible to score the highest number of points. The existence of sites to track the highest karma accounts only served to reinforce that behavior, which wound up having a bunch of knock-on effects like gimmick accounts that jammed themselves anywhere no matter how appropriate (which led to groupies that would try catching collateral karma), bots copying higher-scoring comments to try building a "trusted" account to then flip and sell to advertisers, and likely a bunch of other stuff that I'm not considering. In the end, there was a lot of shouting into the void and not much actual conversation. That's how it felt to me outside of smaller subreddit, at least.

Same exact situation for me, down to putting Jerboa where RIF used to be. I think the appeal to Beehaw for me is its emphasis on community. I've been on the internet for a hot minute, and I didn't realize that I actually missed having a sense of community online. Reddit was basically a source of content for me, and I would lurk almost exclusively. With Lemmy, I'm finding myself commenting and responding far more often. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is here, but I just feel more inclined to actually participate here.

Thank you for solving a mystery I've had since I heard of Lemmy! I kept hearing about a supposed tankie problem, but never saw anything about it. Now I'm even more thankful about choosing Beehaw; I have leftist leanings, but tankies definitely rub me the wrong way.

I'm so glad to hear it, and I hope you enjoy it if you do decide to pick it up! As for payment, my Hollow Knight evangelism is strictly because of how much I enjoy talking about it; the only payment I would ever accept is the team finally releasing their next game (Hollow Knight: Silksong).

Absolutely! I wound up getting the vinyls because of how good it is. What's your favorite song? Mine is probably Reflection (the song that plays in rooms with healing springs)

This is definitely a great technique to bring attention to and I considered mentioning it too. I opted for a more general batch of tips, hopefully the "tutorial" for pogoing hits its mark... There's a room with floating spike chunks that leads to either a money node or a collectible (can't remember which offhand), and that's supposed to be a hint that you can pogo on spikes. I only tried after my third time passing it though, since I thought maybe there was a power-up later that I could use until I decided to say screw it and gave it a try.

I really am a huge fan of how you get tossed into this weird world, but slowly unravel what's happening. Come for the cute bugs, stay for the weirdly compelling story of what's going on with those cute bugs.

Oh, that's heartbreaking lol, I can't imagine the sorrow they must have felt!

If they don't take to it after trying to convince them again, maybe you could offer to stream it for them? I did that for a friend of mine who isn't great at games - we sat on the couch together, I played through, and we talked about things as they were happening (and I gave chunks of lore as they became appropriate to discuss). I like doing that for games I really want my friends to experience if they aren't interested in playing themselves, since you can kind of be a tour guide and make sure they get to see things that you might have missed your first time playing through, and you get to spend time hanging out with that friend. I've done similar with Undertale to great effect!

It's unfortunately become a catch-all phrase meaning "this is hard and you'll die a lot, git gud lol." In this case though, there's a lot of parallels between Dark Souls and Hollow Knight on multiple levels: Themes, gameplay and design philosophies, how lore is dispersed... I can't really elaborate without going into a ton of detail and spoiling things, but needless to say, there's an actual reason for that tag here. I would also say that, while there isn't a specific "easy mode" to switch to, there are different ways to tweak the difficulty while you play. Charm loadouts, putting extra time and effort into finding hidden power-ups (health expansions, for example), and the fact that some of the most challenging portions of the game are basically optional unless you're looking to experience every piece of the lore personally.

I personally don't see any problem with just looking stuff up after playing the game if you're satisfied with the experience you had, but your mileage may vary there - I don't have as much time to spend on gaming, so my tolerance for grinding or bashing my head against a challenge repeatedly is directly tied to how fun the actual gameplay is for me. I was much more tolerant of the difficulty in Hollow Knight because the controls are so tight and responsive that it's just fun for me to play and improve in.

My pleasure, I hope it helps! Just don't get discouraged if you're having trouble - there's one platforming challenge (completely optional, don't worry) that took me something like 2 or 3 days of 8-hour sessions to finally get through. Like I said, I'm not really a great gamer nowadays thanks to not having much time to keep my skills sharp (I used to play Kaizo Mario hacks on a regular basis when I was younger), but it was a compelling and enjoyable enough game to motivate me to keep going.