There’s a lot of overlap, but the other is a bit more general purpose (not just new communities). I joined both to help with community discovery.

There’s more-or-less already an active community for that: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

From their description:

Promote your favourite communities here, or ask about a community you are looking for

A post titled like “Is there a community for TOPIC?” with text in the body indicating you’re interested in making one if not would likely do well there.

I have heard of people studying grain flow, so my thoughts first went down that direction but I was at a loss what that had to do with either quantum entanglement or metals. 😛️

I clearly need more sleep. I spent far too long wondering what “rice physicists” do before realizing what the title actually meant. 🤦️

I’m under the impression the reputation points are either the combined number of upvotes or that minus downvotes

IIRC from kbin – and assuming mbin didn’t change things – boosts counted for two points while upvotes (favorites) are one point and downvotes (reduces) are one point. Boosts are basically retweets, IIRC, and wouldn’t be coming from lemmy users – just from Mastodon, mbin, and other tools that support it.

Edit: To clarify, I mean downvotes reduce by one point.

A while back I noticed that I was recognizing the same voice actor as Fie (from the Trails series of JRPGs) in a lot of other English adaptations of Japanese media – Morgana from P5, Aoi from Danganronpa, Operator 6O from Nier:Automata, Kyubey from Madoka, Ritsu from K-On, Taiga from Toradora, etc. – and looked up the voice actor. Cassandra Lee Morris is now 42 and has a kid. Life goes on, and that makes perfect sense, but it did kind of weird me out a bit to realize that someone knows her voice as “Mom”.

Communities/magazines are similar to subreddits, but unlike subreddits they can be hosted on servers run by unrelated organizations and still interact. Different instances can and do have different ideas about how things should be run but you can still send messages back and forth unless the admins have blocked it.

The first message is warning you that you’re looking at a community that is not local to your instance. You might not be able to see all the posts from that community on your instance. For example, there may be older posts that never got copied over from long before your instance first found out that that community exists.

If I understand mbin’s code correctly, the second message means that no one is subscribed to the community locally, so your instance isn’t getting updated by the remote source any more. You need to have at least one local subscriber to get updates. If you’re interested in the community, subscribe to it.

I think this is the code that produces those messages if anyone wants to dig into it further: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/templates/magazine/_federated_info.html.twig

The definitions for the message strings (in English) are here: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/translations/messages.en.yaml

I don’t know, but there’s a related thread here: https://slrpnk.net/post/18399280

No answers there (as of time of writing this comment), but someone did say they asked about it on IRC.

I’m not involved with running it – and given that this is likely to be a politics heavy community, I’m probably going to stay out of it for the most part. 🙃️ I just happened to see the announcement post that @3dmvr@lemm.ee made to !newcommunities@lemmy.world about a week ago and remembered it.

If you or @3dmvr@lemm.ee want to start a thread in !communitypromo@lemmy.ca feel free though!

!unlockthread@lemm.ee is probably what you’re thinking of.

The current solution is for bots on participating instances to automatically perform the search + subscribe song-and-dance routine. This is pretty surprising to some people[1], and it requires someone to set it up in addition to the instance itself, but it does work.

[1]: I tried to translate an explanation into Japanese for some folks experimenting with Mastodon/Lemmy interaction yesterday – they thought Lemmy had a ton of spam accounts following groups instantly…

As someone who watches gaming footage on PeerTube, I’ve mostly interacted with single creator instances – i.e. either the creator themselves is self-hosting it or it’s run by a fan as a non-YT backup of their Twitch/Owncast/whatever VODs. Those instances generally do not allow anyone else to upload.

Discoverability sucks but the way I’ve found them is by using SepiaSearch and looking for specific words from game titles. I imagine the way most other people find them is that they already know the content creator from Twitch and want to find an old VOD that isn’t archived on YT (e.g. because of YT’s bullshit copyright system) – but that’s just a guess.

I was going to say something similar – having seen 20+ car crashes from my apartment window, I can confirm that many people do not stop when the light is red…

Be careful out there.

It’s surprising that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that’s the first thing I’d change to improve discoverability.

The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel’s playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user’s YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I’ve had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they’ve posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it’s not what I want to see first.)

Another issue I’ve encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there’s likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don’t know how to do it – short of re-encoding the entire video again which I’d rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. (EDIT ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -movflags faststart output.mp4 repacks the video quickly.) This usually doesn’t affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern /download/web-videos and a warning is shown that it’s still being transcoded) but does when that’s done (the URL includes /download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube’s reprocessing.

Downloads from the instances that I’ve found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries…) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry… It would be really nice if I could check that I’ve downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.

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Visual novels, and interactive fiction come to mind as things that are video game adjacent but aren’t necessarily games. Most of the first category I’ve encountered are either porn, horror, or… both – though they can be about anything the author wants to write about, of course, and the relative accessibility of the medium means people have pushed it in a lot of directions even though it’s kind of niche.

Interactive fiction includes things like text adventures and choose-your-own-adventure books. Most of the computer-based ones I’ve encountered involve traversing a node-graph of locations, manipulating items, and solving puzzles – though the gaminess varies a lot depending on the specific title. They’re even more niche nowadays, but people still make and play/read them.

Edit: Not sure if this is quite what you were after or not, but it’s what came to mind.

Games need to figure out what color to show for each pixel on the screen. Imagine shooting lines out from your screen into the game world and seeing what objects they run into. Take whatever color that object is supposed to be and put it on the screen. That’s the basic idea.

To make it look better, you can repeat the process each time one of the lines hits an object. Basically, when a line hits an object, make more lines – maybe a hundred or a thousand or whatever the programmer picks – and then see what those lines run into as they shoot out from the point in all directions. Mix the colors of the objects they run into and now that becomes the color you put on screen.

You can repeat that process again and again with more and more bounces. As you add more and more bounces it gets slower though – since there are so many lines to keep track of!

When you’ve done as many bounces as you want to do then you can shoot out lines one last time to all the lights in the game. If there is an object in the way blocking a light, the color for the object you’re trying to figure out will be darker since it’s in a shadow!

It’s an old and simple idea to figure out what color something is like that by bouncing off objects repeatedly… but it’s hard to do quickly. So, most games until very recently did not work that way. They used other clever tricks instead that were much faster, but made it hard to draw reflections and shadows. Games with those other techniques usually did not look as good – but you could actually play them on old computers.