Lost_My_Mind

So I'm playing Supermarket simulator. And if you notice TCG Simulator looks VERY similar. That's because it uses the same assets. It looks like it's actually the same shop location, on the same street. But in one game, it's a supermarket, and in another game, it's a card game similator.

But if you look, the neighborhood outside of your walls of your shop all looks very dead. Like you're in a movie set, where the rest of the town is actually just wooden building backdrops.

So I figure, what if each "shop" could be a real shop? You play online, and when you log on, your shop has an individual save data. It gets played on a server, and each server has a different set of shops.

So if you're a retro game shop, you're playing in the lot of land number 14. So when you log on, you're looking for a server that doesn't have anyone playing on land lot 14. That's the retro game shop.

When you log on, you can't have infinate time, since time needs to always be moving for everybody else at the same pace......but time also doesn't stop at 9pm, and the deliveries don't stop either. So at 9pm-8am, you restock your shelves. You order backstock for your storage room.

And the shop right next to your retro games shop? Maybe that's the supermarket. That's land plot 13. And you can go into the supermarket, and you can buy things. Just like real life people can come into your retro games shop and buy things.

There's also NPCs obviously, who would be the bulk of the customers.

But the neighborhood would actually look busy, and alive rather than one guy hanging out on a movie set.

And so, you could play supermarket simulator, and someone else could play TCG simulator, and someone else could play gas station simulator, and someone else could play retro games shop simulator, and when you you play online, you're all on the same server, on the same street, and there could be an actual economy. Customers come in, spend their money on you, you spend some of your money at the gas station. There could be a wholesale simulator, where you play the shop the other shops are ordering from on the market. So like when you order furnature, or things to stock your shop, they have to be in stock at the wholesale simulator. Which means the guy who plays that role, affects ALL the stores on the server. Because if he just lets shit go out of stock, you use the competitor, which is automated, and always in stock, but at higher prices.

Because let's say you're Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World

Well, what's stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?

And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it's him. But it's actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.

Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.

I'm really liking the worth RetroMags is doing, and notice they have 16K members, so I assume it's about 4K active monthly users.

I'm wondering if to expand both their users, and the fedizerse's users, if it would make any sense at all to use the servers they use for downloads on a new Lemmy instance, that creates a seperate community for each magazine, and auto populates a new post in the correct community every time they post a new download over on their forums.

They don't REQUIRE membership to download, which is what this whole idea is based on. Since I assume it would be entirely too costly to have downloads on their forums AND a duplicate set of downloads on a seperate server. Seems costly given their massive scale.

Am I dreaming pipe-dreams? Or should I let them know about this idea?

So I just signed up for Mbin at Fedia.IO, and part of the registration says it will send out an email to complete the registration. Great!

It's been like 10 minutes with nothing in "all mail" and nothing in the trash or spam folders either. Is this something I need to wait a while for, or has something gone wrong, and I should contact their staff somehow?

I wish the fediverse would just stick to one set of jargon, and everybody uses the same terms to mean the same thing. Even "instances" should just be called "servers". That's all it is. This server talks to that servers, and information is exchanged.

So, if I understand this right, "magazines" on Mbin are the same as "communities" on Lemmy, are the same as subreddits on reddit. Three names to mean the same thing.

And a "Thread" is just a post. Like I'm making a post right now on Lemmy. If I did this on Mbin it would be called a "Thread".

But then I see there's also "comments" which is self explanitory (I hope...)

And there's also "Posts". But if Threads are posts, then what are Posts?

QUIT FUCKING AROUND WITH TERMS, FEDIVERSE! LETS ALL JUST KEEP THINGS SIMPLE!!!

........I keep thinking I have things figured out, until someone says "yeah, but have you tried this?" and then I look into it, and I'm confused again. Arg!

So I feel like I'm doing peertube wrong. I'm trying to find good content, but it feels like every single instance I find is just "here's the linux news, here's the new linux tips, here's the linux gossip, linux linux linux!"

And I do not give a shit about linux. I learned long ago that I'm not smart enough to figure it out. I just want to find the non-tech, non-video game content. I don't know what I'm doing. I want to search all the instances, all at once, and see what the system recommends.

I don't have a peertube account. I have a piefed account. I'm not against getting a peertube account, but at this point, it's ruining the whole point of the fediverse. If I need to register for a peertube account to have a decent experience, what's the point in having all these services be interconnected. Registering for peertube account would be the THIRD account I would have for the fediverse. But at this point, I just want to find the content.

So, I was thinking that I joined Lemmy.World because Lemmy had more users than MBin. But today I was looking at https://mbin.cocopoops.com/ and started seeing MY posts. I knew Mbin could have different instances. I knew Lemmy could have different instances. And I knew they all federated together.

But I didn't know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I'm sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won't federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.

Mbin, piefed, and Lemmy are essentially reddit replacements. So they should be in a circle. It doesn't matter how many users Mbin has, or piefed has, or Lemmy has. It matters how many the full circle of federated reddit replacements have. Because thats the true circle of users that you can interact with.

So what we need is a website that you enter an instance, and it tells you how big your circle would be on that platform, and a list of federated, and defederated instances with it.

So Lemmy.World would have a pretty high circle. While hexbear would have only itself, if I understand right.

I eat my cereal straight from the box. Dry. Adding milk just makes cereal soggy and flavorless. Everybody wants crunchy cereal, but nobody wants to STOP ADDING THE THING THAT MAKES IT SOGGY!!!

I've never understood why people add milk. It's awful, and it ruins the cereal. Somehow I'M the asshole for adding milk??? Yeah, ok....

They should use maybe 3/4ths of the amount of flavor they do. It's overwhelming, and burns my tongue if I eat large amounts of them in one sitting.

That being said, I don't eat junk food much anymore anyways. Prices are sky high, portions are pathetic, and it's not like I wouldn't be he healthier without it.

Ok, so one of the bigger problems I see on Lemmy is the fact that I subscribe to dozens of different communities, but my feed is always the same. News news news technology technology technology.

What if I want something lighthearted? What if I DON'T want to see certain topics???

Maybe I'm at work, and a big sports game is going on. I don't want spoilers, so now I can't look at Lemmy.

Or what if Nintendo hosts a Nintendo Direct before I get a chance to see it? Welp. Can't look at Lemmy.

But......what if I could? What if my main feed was exactly what it is now. But what if I had user created catagories? I could make one called "News". Now if I want to see the news, I can include that catagory in my home feed. Or I can exclude it from my home feed. I could switch over to the news catagory, and then every community that I've designated under the news catagory that I've created will show ONLY those communities home feed.

Or maybe I want to see only video game related stuff.

Or maybe I only want to see sports stuff.

I could even create user created tabs. I could name the first one "Happy" and it could include light hearted catagories. Things like /c/aww and /c/humor

I could have a tab called "Serious" and it could be all news, and updates on the world.

I could have a tab called "Nerdy" and it could be all technology and video game related stuff.

Or I could have my main home tab, where I choose which communities/catagories do and don't appear.

And you could do the same concept in Mastadon with followed users. If you follow some users who only post about pro-wrestling, and you don't want to see that? Uncheck your pro-wrestling catagory from your home feed tab. Have a seperate tab just for pro-wrestling.

I'm sure you could implement this with other fediverse services. I just haven't used many to give examples of how they would work, if I don't know how the core platforms themselves work.

Ok, so here's a situation I ran into, and thought of a solution for, but I'm not a programmer, so I don't know if this is possible.

I live in Cleveland. Last I checked, we have a population of 300,00ish people. Might be closer to 350,000. Not the point.

As it stands, in general I'd say roughly 10% of general society uses reddit. Using rough numbers, that would mean 30,000ish people. I just checked, and /r/Cleveland has 151,000 subscribers, but only 58 users on the site at the moment I checked. That tells me there's a lot of people subscribed to /r/Cleveland who no longer live in Cleveland.

I refuse to believe that of roughly 300,000 people, half are on /r/Cleveland. Especially if only 58 are online. So, maybe a lot of bots.

That being said Lemmy has probably less than 1% of society. And Cleveland has a finite number of potential users.

So when I look for the Cleveland sublemmy, I find three of them. Two I could join right away, the third is still pending because it seems the mod is the only user, and he hasn't been active in months.

Point is, this city, even if there was only one Cleveland sub would still have a very small userbase. Now we're dividing it among multiple communities all serving the same purpose. There's only so much that happens in Cleveland. The majority of the reddit posts are "where should I eat? What should I do when I visit? Why do you guys have billboards of just eyes?"

There is NOT a lot going on here. And if we split these users up multiple times, you'll have what we have now. Multiple dead communities, with a split userbase. So logically the first idea is "Well you only need one Cleveland community. The other one should close." But that flies against the very foundation of what this place is built on.

So how do you integrate both communities userbases as one, without merging the subs? And that's when it hit me.

Groups.

User groups, and sub groups. Lets start with sub groups.

So lets say I'm the head of Cleveland@instance1 and Fred runs Cleveland@instance2. We both see the userbase problem. So I send Fred a message, and ask if he wants to group up. He says yes. Now we're grouped up. So what does that mean? It means that Joe, a Cleveland resident, could subscribe to Cleveland@instance2. It would then have some checkboxes that say "group Cleveland@instance1 and Cleveland@instance2?"

And for every checkbox you leave ticked, you'll group those subs together. If you don't want to group them, uncheck the boxes of the ones you don't want to group.

So now Joe is subscribed to Cleveland@instance2. But because he's grouped my Cleveland@instance one, everytime he posts, the comments and the up/downvotes for his comment will now be grouped together. So when he makes that post on Cleveland@instance2 it will show up on Cleveland@instance1 too. Anything in that post is technically being posted to Cleveland@instance2

So if you ARE subscribed to Cleveland@instance1 but NOT subscribed to Cleveland@instance2, then you wouldn't even see the post in Cleveland@instance1. You're only seeing it, and able to interact with it from Cleveland@instance1 because they're both officially grouped, and you agreed to the grouping on your end when you subscribed.

You could, in theory reject the grouping when you subscribe, and then subscribe to the second one seperately. Which would keep everything seperate and as it is now. I don't know who would want to do that, but it would be possible.

Now, for the user groups.

Pretty much the same concept, but on an individual basis. So, lets say I subscribe to videogames@instance and I also subscribe to gamers@instance. Those communities have NOT grouped for whatever reason, so YOU group them for yourself.

So now when you post, you'll post once, and it will post your new post once in videogames@instance and once in gamers@instance.

So now you posted two seperate posts, but because you grouped them on an individual basis, you'll see all the upvotes and replies in one post in your inbox on your end. In reality there are two seperate posts, but your interaction with it feels as one.

I just learned about the Fediverse in May. I now have a Lemmy account, and a Mastadon account.

I'm not interested in /kbin, as I have no interest in facebook, but something caught my eye. SpaceHey.

Problem is, with mainstream things, you can google and find out which places are safe, private, not stealing your info........or you can find out that they're facebook, and stealing EVERYBODYS personal data. Even people who've never signed up.

I have less info on SpaceHey. And since I figure you guys know what's going on, maybe you can give it a yay or nay. I'm also interested in Peertube.

I've seen a few of their profiles, and when they say they made it just like 2008 myspace, they're pretty much wrong. This isn't 2008 myspace. By 2008 myspace was still a social network, but they were making major changes to the interface.

The profiles I saw looked more like a customized myspace profile from 2006. It was just a huge difference, but I was there.

Also, I'm unclear if it's because I have no account, but the profile display pictures don't seem to have any way to click them. You used to be able to click them, and go into a page of many pictures. The one on your profile we just called your "default photo". It was the one to represent YOUR profile. I'm also noticing that nobodies default photo is their own face. It's all anime and drawn picture art. That's not in the spirit on 2006 myspace. Your default pic was the one that you thought made you look the best.

So youngin's, don't think the idea of super close face shots, or above the head looking down shots to hide your personal body issues are some new concept. We were doing it in the dying days of 56k connections. Back when some of you were learning your shapes and colors. We were debating if that picture was default worthy, and wondering if we should re-arrange our top 8. Then getting offended when our profile was dropped from one of our friends top 8s, or moved down a rank.

Long before there was "facebook official" there was "top 8 worthy".

So, is there anything bad I should know about SpaceHey, other than the massive amount of nostolgia it's hitting me with?