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I clicked the wrong dialog option and ended up having to fight an entire camp of <no spoilers>. First I panicked when I realized my mistake. Then, knowing I’d saved recently I decided to give it a try. Mid battle I find myself hunched forward anticipating the next move. I pull off some epic shit with water and lightning, they counter with acid puddles, I almost lose to a giant bouncer but I save myself last minute. Somehow, through my panic and adrenaline, I managed to wipe out the entire camp and I am fucking elated.

Not a single person who plays this game walks away without stories to tell. Stories that are completely unique to them, either by choice or mistake. This is what gaming is all about. I don’t understand what sort of horseshit this article is spouting. This game is phenomenal.

I feel like JRPGs completely changed what an RPG video game is. They are watered down compared to the original cRPGs from the 80s and 90s. Then the “westernized” version of JRPGs watered it down even more. The old cRPGs were so big and so complex. OG Baldur’s Gate, yes, but also Wizardry and Ultima too. I enjoyed Dragon Age because I liked the story, but I’d say Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 are more direct descendants of the old cRPG days (DA 2 & 3 bear no resemblance to cRPGs at all). I think Dragon Age games are good modern RPGs everyone should play but Baldur’s Gate 3, imo, is a proper cRPG straight out of the 80s with 2023 graphics.

I’m so thankful this game is proving to be so popular. Maybe people are discovering (re-discovering) what RPGs used to be, and what makes them so great.

Free speech, as a concept, is the very first thing all fascists turn on people who value freedom. It is that value of freedom that makes the free speech argument so powerful. “How can you love freedom if you don’t even let us speak?” they will say with crocodile tears and false humbleness. And then, they will take full advantage of the fairness and moral treatment they are given to promote their brand of hate. You cannot stop fascism by treating it with fairness. They will not give you the same, and the end goal is to destroy the exact thing you are giving to them. Fascism has to be stopped in its tracks, immediately. If you entertain them in any way that allows them to signal with their dog whistles you’ve already lost. And we’ve lost a lot, because our leaders aren’t even bothering to use dog whistles anymore. They’re just stating it outright.

Most people don’t understand what this is or why it’s important. And that’s not their fault. The kneejerk reaction to having data collected is justified due the amount of companies who abuse it. I mean the amount of stuff you have to turn off (and block the stuff you can’t turn off) just to use Windows in a reasonable manner is insane.

I don’t fault people for reacting to this news, even though it’s not even really news. Developers need to know how people use their products if they want to make them better. And it’s opt-in, which is the right way to do it. 1Password certainly knows this and the fact they’re trying to be so transparent shows that they know they need to prove what they claim.

1Password has built a lot of trust with it’s users over the years. There was some controversy over switching to a subscription model, but realistically $3.50/month to have the most important data you possess hosted securely (and they’ve been super transparent about that security too) seems like a no-brainer. To my mind, 1Password isn’t going to do anything to jeopardize their place in the market when there are free and self-hosted services out there. Probably they want to use their app, which is already the best of any password manager I’ve ever used, to be the thing that sets them apart from the competition. And to do that, they need to know how people use it to know what could be better.

The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.

Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.

no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example

Well I think that’s part of the point of the Fediverse: No single server has to scale that much. Sure, the big ones are going to get big and stay big, but no one Lemmy server is ever going to have as many people using it as Reddit does. That means the cost of each instance is going to be tiny in comparison to what Reddit spends to keep one big monolithic site running (which is easily in the millions). Fediverse will distribute users across many instances/platforms which also distributes the cost. Not only do users have many Lemmy instances, they’ve also got kbin, and mastodon, plus any other platform that joins ActivityPub.

Reddit/Facebook style monolithic sites are not viable. You see time and time again these platforms desperately trying to monetize because it’s so expensive to run. Fediverse can have millions and millions of users, but no single entity will have to foot that bill.

This is the best solution I’ve heard so far. Any server could have their own Technology group. Using Federation, anyone from anywhere could subscribe to each of them. Or, instead of subbing to each of them you just sub to the !tech tag, and you automatically get content from all of them. When you start a community you apply any tag you want to be included in.

To me, the instance should be mostly invisible/seamless. Subbing to tags instead of instance communities puts the focus on the content rather than where the content came from. Tags would make one large meta community that simulates how that other site feels, but with the option to still subscribe to a specific community if you ended up liking it more.

Say for instance one of the !tech groups ends up with really good content and discussions and the other smaller ones end up with a lot of duplicates and low quality comments. You’d easily be able to see which one you’d want to sub to directly. In this way tags would make community discovery much easier. Instead of having to seek out 10 different groups on 10 different instances, you sub to a general interest tag and either that works well enough or you discover the one you like the most and sub to that one directly.

Yeah, I hear you. I’ve tried a few different Lemmy instances and they’ve all varied in terms of bugs, posts getting stuck on the main page for days, not being able to load a post I made myself even though I keep getting comments on it. I get it, this is all new. But switching over to kbin made a huge difference. kbin.social is still getting killed from the amount of new users, but imo it looks and works way better than Lemmy while still being able to communicate with people on Lemmy. I’m not sure which system is newer, Lemmy or kbin, but kbin feels way more polished and responsive.