A potentially stupid question so I apologise in advance. Am I right in thinking that this community is sitting on a Lemmy-based server, but it just has an unusual name rather than the typical xxxxx.lemmy/lemmy.xxxxx format?

Well I started off in the Google/Android ecosystem and I just can't get my head around the way Apple devices do some things. There's also cost involved - I buy a new mid-range phone every two or three years that costs me under $300 each time, and then I pair that with a cheap SIM deal (currently $25 a month for unlimited data over 5G). I could hardly do that with Apple given the cost of the device alone...

You're not the only person I've seen saying that - it might be because all the nice people have stayed away during the blackout leaving the toxic sludge to rise to the top in their absence...

Yes it does, but it's a pretty small amount - I subbed to the $10 tier for a month to put together test images for the group and then stopped my subscription, and I'll do the same when I 'create' these characters - I don't need access to that kind of tech all the time.

If you've planned out a campaign I'm sure you could generate all the images that you need for that fee and then un-sub once you're done.

I've created a showcase for my group using Midjourney so that they can see what it's capable of. When we start our new campaign - in the next month or so - I'm going to spin up several variations of each character for our players to pick, based on the descriptions they provide (I'm going to try and post some examples of what I've achieved so far here, lets see what happens).

Frankly they're over the moon about the idea :)

Human wizard Human druid Human barbarian Elf rogue Elf sorcerer Dwarf fighter

I think you're wildly overestimating that timetable - over on that site I'm a member of a sub where you need intimate knowledge of the subject to moderate it effectively (and because of the nature of the subject it gets a lot of trolls to put it mildly). With no community mods that sub would become a cesspit within days, as would subs that are currently the focus of the alt-right, such as science, LGBT subs etc. It's going to be a bin fire if the community mods leave - you'll feel so dirty you'll have to take a shower after every visit to your previously favourite subs...

It's a bit worse than that actually. I'm now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn't have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That's going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, "Aww" gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I'll have to subscribe to both...

So I think I've spotted a problem with how Lemmy's federation actually works. I can give you several examples, but I've spotted that there are several 'Technology' communities that originate on different servers. They're definitely different 'communities' because they have quite dissimilar subscriber numbers. That's potentially going to cause a lot of confusion going forward - I really don't want to have to subscribe to two or three of everything...