Karu 🐲

Microblogging is a terrible social media format when what you want from social media is to read and discuss stuff you’re interested in. In Mastodon, I can scream into the void, but I have no guarantee that anybody will be interested in what I have to say. If all you want is to keep tabs on people it works fine I guess, but as soon as you want to follow topics it becomes incredibly clunky.

You can search keywords or hashtags, but all you get is an unmoderated firehose of loosely connected posts about the topic you want, and other topics for which people use the same words. You can follow hashtags, but then you just get said unfiltered firehose on your TL. Unless everyone somehow agrees in how to use the hashtag, it’s pointless.

Frankly I think all microblogging platforms would improve if there was a closed set of possible hashtags you could use in your posts. Hopefully there would be a unified name convention for each topic, and each hashtag could have a dedicated curation team of some sort, that could remove or relocate posts. Likewise, users should be able to submit a new possible hashtag for everyone to use. This way, I would be able to subscribe to a hashtag, be sure that all the content I receive will be relevant to a topic I care about, and I could post to it knowing that other people who subscribe to the hashtag are guaranteed to be at least somewhat interested in what I have to say. Oh wait, I think I just reinvented Lemmy communities.

While we’re at it, Mastodon is not 2008 Twitter anymore. No one posts via SMS. Inline hashtags should not be a thing, because it lets people optimize the way they phrase their posts for discoverability, and abusing them makes posts very uncomfortable to read. I have not seen as many people on Mastodon doing this as on Twitter, but why even keep inline hashtags at all nowadays? Just keep tags separately from the post’s content.

I can tell you the approach to these problems in my most recent project.

In my project, I have a central “MainGame” node that is the root of the scene where the main game loop happens, and then there is an “OverworldManager”, which then hosts “OverworldMap” nodes and swaps them as required, as well as hosting the Player character node as a sibling to the OverworldMap, rather than a descendant of it, so that I can warp it around easily.

But MainGame has multiple other children, two of them being the InventoryManager and the PersistenceManager nodes. You can access these as soon as you have a reference to the MainGame node by simply calling GetChild(), altough I have wrapper methods for accessing those.

The InventoryManager node hosts a list of tuples in the form of (ItemType, amount), and it has multiple methods AddItem, RemoveItem, HasItem, etc. All of these just access this list of tuples.

The PersistenceManager is responsible for keeping track of persistent changes in the many OverworldMaps. It’s just a single wrapper for a list of NodePaths for nodes that have been “flagged”. Because OverworldManager never has more than one map loaded at any given time, every node in the map will keep the same exact NodePath relative to the scene root even if you unload and reload the map. This means that, when for example a locked door or a destructible crate is instantiated as part of the map, you can check in its _Ready function whether the game’s PersistenceManager has flagged the path to this crate, and in that case, just destroy it again or QueueFree it outright. You should then make sure to have the PersistenceManager flag this node when you open it/destroy it/etc. You can actually extend this approach to have the PersistenceManager be able to hold multiple flags with values for a given node.

Then, when you save the game, you can easily add independent Save and Load functions to each of these managers and call all of them from a SaveManager node if you want to persist the data across runs. Really, all of these managers may as well be autoload scripts, but behind the scenes autoloads are just nodes that are siblings to your root node. Personally, I avoid autoloads entirely because I’d rather manage these nodes myself, but there is nothing wrong per se with using autoloads.

As for HP and damage; I don’t actually use a node dedicated to HP. Instead, my BattleScene holds Battler nodes, which define their many attributes in battle, one of them being HP. It also has a static function CalculateDamage(Battler attacker, Technique technique, Battler target) that I use to calculate how much HP a given technique should remove, and because it is a private function of Battler, I also get access to private Battler data such as its stat boosts. For persisting the player’s HP, I have a dedicated PlayerManager node. This obviously only makes sense if you have separate Overworld and Battle scenes; if you are fighting enemies in the Overworld in real time, your approach will need to be different.

I hope that helps.

“ML philosophy”, as in the somehow monolithical ideological orientation of the .ml instance, is not a thing. Regardless of what this extremely loud minority keeps crying about, the truth is that .ml admins either don’t care or are not very good at keeping “dissent” at bay. If anything, .ml is more tolerating of a wider variety of ideologies, including neoliberalism but not limited to that, which is in reality the pain point that y’all keep complaining about. .world is, by comparison, a lot more relentless at silencing dissent and maintaining a homogeneous ideology, just one that a lot of westerners are comfortable with. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are also a lot more dedicated to maintaining ideological homogeneity, but no amount of you (generic, not you in particular) pretending that .ml operates in the same exact way is going to make it true.

“ML philosophy”, as in marxism-leninism, is a branch of a wide family of marxist ideologies that has laid out the groundwork for a lot of the modern framework on how we understand society and labor. I’d believe you if you told me you haven’t seen it because it’s not mainstream; doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that it isn’t a fruitful field of study for sociologists. Notably, it is also not widely discredited outside of the US, a country that has a history of propagandizing exactly against this kind of thing.

I don’t understand your point about Dessalines’s place of residence? Even if you live in the US, you can be critical of the hegemonic narrative, you know. But my experience seems to be the converse to yours: This weird obsession with being concerned about tankies coming and eating you is genuinely not that strong of a thing except for extremely online edgelords. I hardly even see this kind of behavior outside of specifically westerners on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Lemmy. And even then, there are more sane westerners on all these platforms who know that, in real life, the ones out to eat us all are most likely not coming exactly from that side of the spectrum.

Whenever I see comments like these, and their posters are asked to ellaborate, they usually always end up with something along the lines of “Well I wanted to be transphobic in peace and they wouldn’t let me”.

I won’t ask you to elaborate. Don’t know if it’s your case, don’t care either. At this point if you are seriously attempting to conflate .ml with the other two instances you are undoubtedly engaging in bad faith. But if this wasn’t already a red flag in its own right, you went out of your way to confirm it by saying that “.ml is legitimately worse than reddit in basically every way”.

You are not “thousands of users” and it’s quite pretentious of you to project your experience onto so many people. However, by adding fuel to the constant fire of the never-ending tankie discourse on Lemmy, you are helping making this place hostile to everyone except for a very thin fraction of the political spectrum (the one that is allowed to thrive in the West), therefore making it suck on Lemmy for, you know, actual thousands of users of many different backgrounds and creeds that don’t share the rabid anti-tankie brainrot.

Not willing to start an argument, since this whole topic about “tankies” on Lemmy is exactly as toxic, disingenuous and unproductive as it was back on Reddit, so I might not reply further than this.

But elsewhere in this thread I have seen you post “evidence” that was actually just some ridiculous meanwhileongrad thread. If we are going by those standards then I might as well pull out all the exaggerated out of context circlejerking about liberals that is common on Hexbear. If we are to drop our collective IQ to zero, we may well be playing this game in both directions. But oh wait, turns out it’s only bad when Hexbear does it to own the libs, but it’s fully solid compelling evidence when another certain instance does it about “tankies”.

The claim that .ml is censoring comments “for nothing else other than being against Russia/China/NK”, at the very least, does not match my experience of browsing .ml at all. But if you do have evidence as you say, I invite you to actually post it and let people discuss. It shouldn’t be hard; the modlog is public.

That said, I’m personally not interested in starting the 95474214th Lemmy argument about tankies this week on this website so don’t expect me to reply.

Jesus fucking christ dude, the insane obsession you guys over at lemmy.world have with tankies is unreal. Maybe go outside and touch some grass.

It’s always the same two instances complaining about the rest of the Fediverse not bending over to bootlick the US overworlds, and accusing the rest of somehow simping for other regimes just on the basis of opposing that. It is seriously getting tedious and insufferable.

On top of that, including lemmy.ml in there is just disingenuous. Grad and hexbear sure, they are spaces openly and deliberately created to discuss leftist politics. But there is literally nothing making lemmy.ml any less generalist than any instance, maybe other than a certain instance that is happy to ban and defederate anyone who dares question the US hegemony. You cannot bind lemmy.ml to “tankism” on any basis other than the Lemmy devs being socialist themselves despite letting anyone of any political creed use their software, unless you are dumb enough to take decontextualized meanwhileongrad-level bullshit seriously.

I moved over from .world to .ml to flee away from this American exceptionalism brainroot and, guess what? It didn’t work. I keep seeing the same constant complaints about this fictional group of Lemmy users that really like Putin and Xi or something and weaponizing those complaints to support and enact hostile actions against people and instances discussing anti-capitalist, anti-establishment policy. The only thing that changed is that now, besides that, I can also see leftists users engage in posts from my own account. So, funnily enough, the echo chamber effect became weaker after I moved to .ml.

It was a rather funny timing that this whole discussion about lemmy.ml being a hardcore tankie instance that should be widely defederated etc came to be about at the time that lemmy.world defederated lemmygrad and consequently ran out of red-flavored scapegoats to claim that they are being oppressed by some nebulous left-wing echo chamber.

I was genuinely hoping to see some examples of it, as I am honestly concerned about the safety of trans people on Lemmy due to recent events. But despite being subscribed to a few Hexbear comms myself, my detectors hasn’t gone off with them.

I am, of course, also concerned that transphobia is sometimes only being used as the subject of concern trolling to push more hostile actions against openly leftist instances.

There has been recently a heavily transphobic drama involving a certain non-binary user with a neopronoun that got massively dogpiled on, for no good reason that I could actually find, and the transphobia was not exactly coming from Hexbear or any tankie instance.

I’m open to reevaluating my relationship to that instance if transphobia is something that they allow or indulge. But sadly, I need receipts to ensure that you are not just disingenuously weaponizing the concept of transphobia to shit on an instance you don’t like.

You cannot assume that communities with the same name are meant to be on the same topic.

Say I set up an instance focused on discussing parties at home. There are fun in-person games you can play with your friends when many of you are over, so I would create a community c/games for discussing them. Now, what if I want my instance to federate with lemmy.world? They already have a c/games that is dedicated to videogames. Maybe I also would need a community dedicated to videogames, but I’d have to call it c/videogames, because I already have a c/games.

Some human intervention would be required to let the network know that the local c/videogames is the one that has to federate with lemmy.world’s c/games, and not the local c/games.

Maybe an automatic suggestion would be fine as a starting point, but it would be more useful that communities themselves could explicitly establish which remote communities they are associated with, without depending on the names.

The idea that I’m talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I’d like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don’t also follow them independently.

This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.

The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn’t achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.

There was some proposal that I have seen multiple times on Lemmy and at least once on the GitHub repo that communities should be able to subscribe to each other much like users can subscribe to communities. I vastly prefer this to other proposals such as auto-merging communities with the same name, which I can think of a few ways that can go wrong.

It would also be reasonably intuitive for the average user, since following stuff is already a familiar action you take on social media. You wouldn’t really need to understand the quirks of federation to know why posting to one community makes it appear on other downstream communities. And as far as I know about ActivityPub (which is admittedly not much), it’s not a stretch use it to implement a feature like this.

I wonder if this proposal ever reached anywhere.

Let this be my last reply in this thread because I don’t feel like spamming my comment history with this, and also I kinda regret bringing the word tankie to this conversation (it was 2 am and I was quite literally just rambling about my discomfort with this platform. I wouldn’t done it if I had had a fresher mind). I also don’t want to leave drag on read, and I hope that drag doesn’t see this as me being hostile.

Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years

I am going to put into question that drag actually sees this. Marxism in particular has been wildly propagandized against since WWII for mostly geopolitical reasons, and these testaments about marxists being assholes often comes from “Someone told me that someone told them that etc”, or from “I once saw one (1) marxist be an asshole so all of marxism should be tossed away”. That said, being marxist does of course not shield you from being an asshole or having biases. But modern marxist literature is often very intersectional and very critical of the way we conceive our relationship to society and identity, and scholars on LGBT-specific issues often use marxist methodologies as well.

This is not to say that marxism itself has always been devoid of biases etc, it hasn’t, but as a product of how culture in the 19th and 20th century has evolved, it reasonably can’t. This affects all schools of thought across the entire political spectrum, not just marxism, but this is often weaponized against marxism in particular, I wonder why.

I am not going to justify Nutomic’s very transphobic assertion nor am I going to claim that it is a lone exception to the norm. What I am going to claim is, however, that this kind of “the only axis of discrimination that matters is class, all other issues are burgeois diversions” thought, as common as it is, flies in the face not only of serious modern marxism proponents, but also the groundwork that it has laid out for a lot of other liberation movements. So it’s not that Nutomic is a marxist and therefore a transphobe, it’s more like Nutomic is a marxist and a transphobe, and he should be called out for being a transphobe, not for being a marxist. Same as if a fat person is an asshole; they should be called out for being an asshole, not fat. Same as if a black person is violent; they should be called for being violent, but not for being black. Or, god forbid, same if an alleged troll uses neopronouns; the crime there is trolling, not having a neopronoun, and these should not be conflated.

However, my complaint in my first comment, and if y’all don’t care about my wall of text let this be my TL;DR, I hate how Lemmy keeps labeling literally everyone to the left of Biden a “tankie”. Maybe the slur does have a proper usage for red-themed bigots, but I can’t possibly be a tankie and therefore shill Russia or China, or even somehow support Trump (???), for ideologies as extremist as: Thinking that I should be able to afford a home without rotting away at an office.

The word “tankie” here is being thrown around like the word “feminazi” used to be used. Mysoginists used to insist in a distinction between “actual serious feminists” and “feminazis who want all men to die”, but in practice, any woman that so much as wanted to have a live outside the kitchen was already called a feminazi by tons and tons of angry men. On Lemmy, supporting literally, and I mean literally any policy to improve people’s lives past basic social democracy (sometimes not even this) already gets you put in the tankie zone. And THAT’s what making me, and as a matter of facts others, increasingly uncomfortable on this platform.

someone trolling with neopronouns is trivially handled by just accepting the neopronouns

Absolutely, and I can’t stop thinking about that.

For the sake of argument, let’s take at face value the claims that drag is just some anti-trans troll that is doing the attack helicopter bit. That drag is secretly some 4channer cis dude in mom’s basement wanting to stir up some drama on Lemmy to expose hyporcrisy.

Then this troll has done an absolutely stellar job forcing everyone to show their true colors on this topic.

Drag has proven, unquestionably and beyond a shade of doubt, that Lemmy is not safe for non-binary people, not even on Blahaj. And that is despite the admin’s (in my eyes) best efforts to handle the situation.

Then, of course, there is the tiny little detail that this is a wildly bad faith assumption that requires going through a few hoops. Most of the assumption hinges on neopronouns being quirky and uncommon. And if the assumption happens to be wrong, then all this dogpiling has achieved is to wreak havoc on a vulnerable person’s mental health, and possibly even cause some trauma down the line.

I don’t care if dragonfucker needs to apologize about wronging someone else; at this point a few users absolutely need to apologize to drag as well.

Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.

It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.

You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.

Yeah, I have, and it’s honestly disgusting. But for every pig shit emoji I have seen, I have also seen hundreds of comments shitting on tankies, dunking on commenters for expressing “radical leftist opinions” that are not that radical outside of social media, shitting on the work of the Lemmy devs for being professed marxist-lenninists, or claiming that Lemmy.ml is somehow cancer on the network that needs getting rid of, because it’s nominally a tankie instance despite the sheer amount of democrat shilling, Israel apologia and NATO bootlicking you can see here.

It’s a matter of scale. I will concede that I simpatize with the more leftist parts of the political spectrum, both marxists and anarchists, but I feel like at this point I would be grossed out at Lemmy even if I was 100% a liberal. Political disagreements are fine I guess, but the way they permeate the culture on Lemmy is weird, obsessive and unhealthy, and most importantly, it comes from a very small number of instances. And it’s not the tankie ones.

The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don’t know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag’s involved in, or how much of that is drag’s fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.

Like, I’m not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is… that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that’s somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag’s gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim “See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I’m comfortable tolerating!”.

It’s making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren’t really an emotionally charged topic for me. I’m cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag’s quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.

I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don’t like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It’s a whole new level of fucked up.

My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I’m a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.

Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it’s worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.

My bet on how the Presents is gonna play out:

• TCG Pocket event
• Café Remix event
• Pokémon Go event
• Masters EX event
• Pokémon Sleep update
• New game that looks a lot like Mystery Dungeon DX but it turns out to be another mobile gacha game
• Trailer for Legends Z-A, releases on Nintendo Switch 1 on October 17th
• Ishihara: “There’s one more thing we’d like you to see”
• Teaser showing the logos for Pokemon North and South, releases on Nintendo Switch 1 on November 28th

This is not a wishlist mind you, just a half-joking half-serious prediction

Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?

Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.

Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?

You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.

While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.

I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.

While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.

Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.

Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.

I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.

Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.

But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.

Maybe I’m not understanding things properly but, aren’t the latter four points also good to fight against pollution? Or is it just car-brained people complaining that they cannot take their car wherever they want anymore?

Doraemon is incredibly popular in Spain, to the point that basically everyone no matter the age knows at least the premise and the main characters. It baffled me when I found out that it was largely unknown in other western countries.

Edit: I just remembered Shinchan, another anime that is huge in Spain but not very popular elsewhere.