There are lots of different kinds of games out there. If you’re new to games and like puzzles, here are a few I can recommend.

Portal is humorous and has fun puzzles, pretty easy to get into. Viewfinder is another similar type of game, also The Stanley Parable

Baba Is You is a creative puzzle game.

Planet of Lana, and Limbo, and Somerville are neat puzzle/platformer games.

Torchlight us a good example of an action RPG genre, Children of Morta is another.

FTL is a neat roguelike game.

Faeria is a card deck building game.

Turn based tactics games can be pretty fun, and are easy to get into. Triangle Strategy is a good one to try.

I also find narrative driven games really fun. For example, The Wolf Among Us is really excellent. Afterparty is pretty entertaining.

All of these should be fairly easy to get into if you’re just starting gaming.

Sure, if a big instance started to dominate the fediverse it would be a form of centralization. However, the protocol being designed with federation in mind makes it much easier for people to migrate from that instance if it becomes a bad actor.

Going back to the original point though, I do think that fediverse could be marketed better in a way that would appeal to more people. Since we agree that federation is a desirable feature, the focus should be on figuring out how to explain it to people in a sensible way.

Sure, but all of this basically comes down to poor marketing. It’s not an inherent problem with the technology or with the concept of federation.

It shouldn’t be surprising either given that Mastodon is a niche platform developed largely as a volunteer effort. The reason people advocating Mastodon tend to focus on stuff like on the flaws of the centralized social media is because that’s what matters to them. We see pretty much the same thing happening with Linux, and many other open source projects.

This is the point I was making above, BlueSky has a professional marketing team that understands how to sell their product to the general public. That’s the main reason BlueSky is gaining users at a faster rate.

Regarding the Gmail problem, it’s true that we could end up with one major instance most people are on. I don’t see that as a huge issue in practice since you can still choose use different instances. That’s a fundamentally better situation to be in.

For example, I don’t use Gmail and I run my own personal Mastodon instance using masto.host, this doesn’t stop me communicating with people on Gmail or major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social.

I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that federation is a significant obstacle in practice. Email is a great example of a federated platform that even the least tech literate people are able to use just fine. It could be argued that Mastodon onboarding process could be smoother, but that’s not an inherent problem with it being federated.

In my view, the simplest answer is that BlueSky has much better marketing because it has a ton of money behind it and it’s been promoted by Dorsey whom people knew from Twitter. So, when people started abandoning Twitter, they naturally went to the next platform he was promoting.

I’d also argue that there is a big advantage to having smaller communities of users that focus on specific topics of interest and can federate with each other. In my experience, this creates more engaging and friendlier environment than having all the users on the same server. Growth for the sake of growth is largely meaningless.

Absolutely, and there’s actually been a substantial amount of research on the subject as well. The way we perceive time is a product of our emotional state, and the environment.

Yet, the fact remains that people did get comfortable with email, and even the least tech illiterate people are able to use it.

That’s a recent phenomenon though, and it’s effectively been forced on people by the largest email provider making it difficult to use others. My original point was that people didn’t find it confusing to register for different mail providers when that was easy to do.

You don’t have to make an informed decision. Signing up for an instance isn’t a blood pact. If you find the instance you singed up for isn’t to your liking, You can easily migrate your account to another. Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587

Mastodon being federated is absolutely not a flaw. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place. The fact that people got used to using centralized platforms is an aberration and this needs to be actively fought against.

How is picking a Mastodon server different from signing up for email, finding a discord server, signing up to follow channels on youtube, and so on. Somehow people have no problems figuring those things out, but when it comes to Mastodon this is constantly brought up like some insurmountable challenge.

I use Lemmy and Mastodon about equally. I find I like Lemmy for discussions, while Mastodon is good for news just because there are a lot more users overall, and you can follow different news feeds on it.

unfortunately looks that way

yeah sadly

Black Heart from Nine Treasures for expanding horizons :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1TRPCPoVhw&list=OLAK5uy_ki7KfC9keEcJRL5bnPdpa_M_aedfAXFSE

true

Yup, we tend to take our world for granted, but there’s so much to see even in things that normally seem mundane. Learning to stop and appreciate things has been a really eye opening experience for me as well.

I’m sorry to inform you, but Burgerland is not technologically advanced enough to tally the results in a day.

indeed, it’s basically a spyware company at this point

Also worth noting that the US continued to do business with the nazis well into the war, and IBM famously facilitated the holocaust.

I got into photography during the pandemic as a way to go outside and stay active. I find it makes you pay attention to the environment around you a lot more closely. Things you normally wouldn’t notice become interesting.