There are still plenty of forums around the internet. I quite enjoy DCSS tavern, a forum focused on one of my favorite games. Forums have the advantage of usually having a topic they are focused on so they are less politics-focused.

Chatrooms, mainly hidden in Discord and Telegram but also present in Matrix, XMPP and IRC (although the latter are mostly about FOSS), are going strong and will always be there for us. I don’t like the format so can’t really recommend anything but it’s trivially easy to find a Discord room and some Matrix rooms are spread around Fedi.

Blogs are an interesting case. They can have comment sections although the most active ones are actually Bluesky/Mastodon replies in disguise. The one blog that has a very active comment section without any social media integrations is CRPG addict. But blogs can be social without comments - by responding to or be inspired by each other. bearblog.dev has some features to help with content discovery.

There are some smaller, more experimental social websites like cozy.talk and midnight.city. The former is actually pretty active but it also has features I don’t really like. Most of these sites are rather slow and inactive.

Then there’s also Tumblr. I never was on this website myself but, from what I’ve heard about it, it’s kind of a bridge between enshittified big socials and more classic experience like what Fedi has. Obviously, it will not be this way forever and one day it will be as bad as Xitter and Reddit. But it’s something.

RIP Cohost.

It’s interesting how your software includes my (outdated) display name as a link to signify a reply while the more common way of doing so on Fedi is by using the username, like @catfeeder@piefed.blahaj.zone

That’s hopeful

I find it so funny how the general attitude to growth here changed from hopeful “reddit, fear us for we are coming after you!” right after the API disaster to the current coping that “we are at the best point of Lemmy’s existence - if we gain any more people we will literally turn into reddit at its worst because reasons”.

Like yeah, it was sad seeing all the people departure back to Reddit after a few weeks of trying Lemmy. But the coping strategy you developed isn’t very productive, you see? Not every one who laments the lack of people is driven by corporate values. Sometimes it’s about diversity: more women, more people of color, more people in their 20s, more people outside the anglosphere and EU, more religious people. More people who are still able to HAVE FUN!

But yeah, dismiss me as a spez’s alt or whatever. Enjoy your exclusionary leftist infighting club.

Another option is to create new communities where this kind of behaviour is explicitly forbidden and enforce it without making any apologies to other people or yourself.

Unfortunately, if there’s already an active community out there then most people won’t bother to visit your new community, let alone posting on there. After all, most lemmings are okay with overwhelming political topics on here - otherwise we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.

Yep, Fediverse is made and maintained by and for political activists and technology nerds. Mastodon is the same, Peertube is the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pixelfed and Loops were also like that. That’s just how Fedi is - if you want to talk to another demographic you go somewhere else.

Despite this, it is possible to make a consistently politics-free experience, at least on Lemmy/Piefed. But you need to carefully curate your subscription feed and do some blocking (domain blocking on Piefed is very powerful) on your behalf. You will end up with a small feed but it’s better than the doomscrolling hell of /all.

For example, most gaming communities on Lemmy are actually corpodrama about Sony, Rockstar and all the other AAA gaming companies - stuff I genuinely don’t give a damn about. Then I found !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works and realized just how much more I enjoy posting there than on other comms I tried. People there are very chatty and aren’t too keen on derailing the conversation to some BS.

So, seek out communities that better fit your needs, block domains and annoying people (maybe keywords too) and do not feel like you must only participate on here - if your needs are better met by another platform, consider going on there instead.

wrong

It’s a gesture from Dark Souls 3 that lets you point down. Immature players use it to say “haha owned you” to their opponents during PvP encounters.

Weirdly enough, I have a similar experience with Dark Souls. I love DS1 and 2 but I have basically no interest in most other Souls-likes.

rewarding myself with a sweet treat after every minor inconvenience

woah woah no need to call me out like that that’s brutal

She’s so real for this, coming-outs fucking suck so much, cis people are so mean and often have no idea what gender even means. “So are you a gay (man)?” NO I’m a fucking WOMAN

I find the idea of merging these two really unpopular features together quite amusing, ngl.

As for my opinion on it, one’s “reputation” or “karma” should never limit one’s ability to interact with any platform because such a limitation gives an incentive for karma-farming - thus decreasing the quality of content on such platform for every participant. Just leave “reputation” as a stat that only admins can see to help them with their moderation duties.

Holy fuck there’s a chapter literally called “Laying hands on my students…”

Okay I had enough of this manga I guess :D

I never thought about that actually… my experience with Souls-like is largely defined by offline experience because my broke teenage self just pirated the games. It was always a given for me that these games are supposed to feel lonely.

That’s a funny revelation haha

Well I lost my job recently so I have some extra time on me. Might as well do something productive with it!

Like what, for example?

https://piefed.social/post/2263975

I’m guessing cross-posting is fully working via Lemmy, but not quite so on PF?

It used to be limited to posts with a link on PieFed until some versions ago when the functionality was extended to posts with an image. It still works perfectly fine on my instance that runs an older version of PF.

Lemmy, on the other hand, supports cross-posting any kind of post, including those without links and images.

pleased to meet you

Hello!

That’s strange! Does it appear on posts with a link? If not then it’s probably some bug. If you still have a Lemmy account, you can cross-post from it and then enable notifications on the second post in Piefed. At least, that’s what I used to do back when Piefed couldn’t cross-post pictures.

I did find incremental progression games interesting in how they make the extrinsic motivation, the numbers-go-up system, the core game mechanic.

My experience with games like this (Cookie Clicker, Vampire Survivors, Wizard Tower, etc) is that they are a fun little distraction that gets boring very quickly. Like, they can captivate me for an hour or two but eventually it becomes blatantly obvious that this game just abuses my brain without providing an actually worthwhile experience.

They’re typically very noninvasive; you can ignore them, disable them

Notifications are inherently invasive. For many people, ignoring them isn’t a problem but not everyone is as lucky as you are. I disable any not-essential notifs anywhere I use because I can’t not being distracted by them.

As for disabling them, the only way to do this on Steam is (was?) to disable the entire overlay which is… a bit too much? I know many people rely on the overlay so they probably wouldn’t go as far.

But it’s also worth mentioning that the author of the article is a gamedev and there’s a whole additional layer of nuance in the discussion when it comes down to releasing your game without achievements.

Because, if you want to release your on xbox or playstation, you must include achievements and some of them must be attainable during a normal playthrough. This is the reason behind weird trophies in Deltarune like “buy an armor piece” and “equip an armor piece”.

Valve doesn’t force achievements on developers. But there is a very loud minority of gamers who love to demand. They will yell in the Steam forums, complain on Reddit, bang at the door of the developer’s Discord channel. It’s quite obnoxious.

My girlfriend tends to be a completionist as well. She would often try to 100% a game she’s playing, or at least to get as close to it as feasible.

But what surprises me the most about her approach is that she’s completely chill about it. She doesn’t force herself through miserable shit just to get an achievement.

And my experience with completionism is completely different. There’s always an achievement that plain sucks. Getting 100% in Dark Souls 2 involved a lot of boring grinding and getting through the game 2 and a half times on the same character. Getting 100% in Lunacid forced me to grind a useless spell from bunnies for two hours.

I don’t know, I just feel like it is better for me, my time and my mind to not see achievements at all, to not think about them and be focused on games themselves. The system is clearly not for me haha.