“Don’t you guys have phones?”

Biggest physical room I’ve witnessed a misread happen in

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

An AoE2 licensed reskin that added new mechanics like shield generators and air units. Still have fond memories of it, and it’s been absolutely wild to see that there’s still a community for it after all these years.

Just lack of numbers. Reddit’s at it’s best when I can use it to discuss some incredibly niche topic. That early 2000s RTS that nobody remembers? Got a few dozen redditors still posting memes. New indie game drops? There’s enough redditors on it that we can talk about it.

But lemmy seems really bad for trying to enjoy any community that isn’t a big political or meme centerpiece. Any particular game or IP that isn’t a lowest common denominator? It’ll get maybe 3 posts a month.

No more interesting discussions of gameplay mechanics or inspirations or character analyses, no burning out an entire workday browsing the top all-time and giggling like an idiot, it’s just dead here.

The same massive numbers that made reddit insufferable for some are what make niche communities inhabitable at all.

The dream would be that they manage to make their own glorious free & open source version, so that after a brief spike in corporate profit as they fire all their writers and artists, suddenly nobody needs those corps anymore because EVERYONE gets access to the same tools - if everyone has the ability to churn out massive content without hiring anyone, that theoretically favors those who never had the capital to hire people to begin with, far more than those who did the hiring.

Of course, this stance doesn’t really have an answer for any of the other problems involved in the tech, not the least of which is that there’s bigger issues at play than just “content”.

Rising tide lifts all boats, so let’s lift the biggest boats. That’ll surely raise the tide.

“Poor artists imitate, great ones steal”

I have no idea who actually coined this, but I heard once that it was Mark Twain. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, but it sounds like something he’d say and attaching his name to it actually helps convey the message and its tone, so fuck it, Mark Twain said that.