Board games! I particularly like ‘party games’ that are almost activities, easier to get other people to try and they support banter/socialising.

Here are a couple suggestions for playing with friends/family indoors:

• Banangrams (2+ competitive scrabble race)
• Codenames (2+ word association, or image association if you get the pictures version)
• Gloom (2+ card game, good for story-tellers)
• Dixit (3+ image association)
• Telestrations (2 or 3+ ‘illustrations’/‘telephone game’ - basically Gartic Phone)
• Just One (3+ word association)

But maybe you want something that you can do solo…? I have a few I like doing for that.

• Illustration. I do it digitally on PC with a drawing tablet, Krita is free art software.
• Jigsaws. I have a special jigsaw holder I can slide under the bed so I can take as long as I want and not block the dinner table.
• Sleight of hand. Depends on space. I wouldn’t twirl my staves inside, but things like poi, fans, card magic, yoyo tricks etc will work in a larger room.
• Origami. I recommend getting dedicated origami paper as its not only prettier, its already perfectly square and its a thinner stock designed for folding.

I’ve moved in and out of the spaces for a while but never fully immersed, in part because I didn’t feel strongly about any potential fursonas, and have a disinterest in the most popular art styles used. I’ve used a rat as an avatar in the past but I don’t consider the rat to be representative of me so much as my artist’s signature. And it’s always been drawn as a cartoon rat, not an anthro rat.

I did used to draw a lot of aliens, monsters, and dragon-people though, and identify with those. It helped me feel stronger or more capable to imagine myself that way. If I ever do settle on an animal to present me online and join the furry community ‘properly’, it will probably end up being either a fantasy fusion, a scalie, or both.

You could always just go to beehaw.org or lemmy.world directly and register a new acc there, and still subscribe to all the same communities. You don’t actually lose anything that matters by signing up elsewhere. Even your own post history on your lemmy.ml account can be viewed by just going to lemmy.ml to log in again, if it matters to you.

In fact, signing up to a moderately-sized instance like lemmy.world may also be good for your usage; lemmy.ml is being slammed by incoming users, so anybody using it (even if they’re viewing other instances’ communities) feel the chug. If it goes down, all of Lemmy is inaccessible to you.

But if you’re on a different, smaller instance, then you can continue ticking over while the behemoths are struggling by staying in shallow waters until they recover from the server load. A moderately-sized instance is more likely to get ongoing support than a small, newer one is; and less likely to time out or be hugged to death than a larger one is.

That’s a great point, too.

I chose beehaw has my home instance because it’s community-focused, has an application process, and the communities are premade umbrellas (so people don’t fragment into echo chambers).

But lemmy.ml is already visibly showing the signs of Reddit migration. I think the users that are migrating are still the ‘better’ of Reddit (intend to contribute, care enough to go through the process of learning Lemmy). But lemmy.ml is rapidly filling up with the same fragmented, specialised echo chambers that Reddit’s culture developed.

That’s not automatically bad - a person who only plays older games values a space that isn’t dominated by news of recent releases, and a person that’s child-free will struggle to find recommended doctors for sterilisation in a ‘Family’ or ‘Parenting’ umbrella sub.

But it seems that people are coming to Lemmy with the expectation that they can turn it into Reddit, complete with the isolated communities/subreddits they’re used to. If not enough of them adapt to what makes Lemmy’s mixed-spaces different, users could play their own role in Lemmy’s ‘enshittification’ for older users, who lose the shared respectful discussion in favour of hundreds of echo chambers.

I think my biggest horny-joke peeve was the “must not look”. The ‘joke’ relies on the shallow nonsensical (and frankly, misandrist) idea that every man is an emotionless, purposeless horndog who only ever cares about sex, and is literally incapable of being around a woman without immediately trying to do a sex.

Do most men enjoy sex? Do most straight men enjoy admiring those they find attractive? Sure, like most people do, regardless of gender. Does men’s desire deny those men their personhood or identity; are they devoid of other passions or interests? Of fucking course not!!

But for reddit… a man and woman are in the same photo. The photo could be of literally anything, it doesn’t matter, it works for karma-farming. You now have two possible jokes:

1. He’s looking at her tits/ass? You don’t need to make a joke, actually. Post as-is, let the comments fill with (sigh) unzips or similar. Actually, make that your OP post title, too.

2. He’s not looking at her tits/ass? Surely he is as desperately horny and single-minded as the rest of us, surely his sexual frustration defines how he moves throughout the world like it does us, surely he is thinking must-not-look must-not-look.

The kind of people who make that joke really indicate that their own sexual frustration has become such a defining part of their own lives that they can’t fathom anybody else feeling differently.

Lemmy is decentralised, so there’s no way to establish the concept of a ‘super community’ without decided a specific instance plays that role - an instance that, ultimately, is hobby run and just as vulnerable to outages as the others. What happens when the instance running the Super goes down?

There’s also no way to make a Super any more official than any other. It can handshake a bunch of instances, but unless a user registers to the Super, they still need to search for them like they do now to introduce them to their own instance. A ‘Super’ may as well just be an instance deciding to put a Megathread of federated servers in its own Support community.

If the Super federates with a bunch of different instances, it also limits those instances abilities to defederate from each other. We’d end up with one of the following:

1. several ‘supers’, each with their own federations (meaningless bloat compared to the current system - you also can’t prevent somebody from making their own super, so this is practically inevitable anyway)
2. many instances that are effectively ‘shadowbanned’ because they aren’t in ‘The Official Super’
3. users using the Super to be active across defederated communities and limit moderation’s ability to keep out bad actors
4. large instances becoming defederated from the Super to limit 3.

I’d suggest users subscribe to duplicates, for a few reasons (ultimately about federation and safety in redundancy).

1. Connectivity.

Until an instance first reaches out to introduce itself to another instance, communities are not visible. Somebody on lemmy.ml can look for ‘gaming’, but until somebody searches for !technology@beehaw.org to introduce lemmy.ml and beehaw.org to each other, then beehaw’s communities like beehaw.org/c/gaming will not be in the results.

Having duplication helps communities find people across many instances. While it’s true that one will likely get bigger than the other, people cross-posting in them or being active in both will allow them to act as bridges to each other, improving how instances network.

2. Longevity.

Lemmy is federated. That means we have dozens of different servers running in different homes, basements, hobbyist offices. It’s not centralised, and they’re passion projects. So not only is decided which instance should be the ‘official’ one meaningless, having at least two active somewhat-duplicates provides a level of redundancy if one of them shuts down. (Say, the owner dies, or goes bankrupt, or their office is hit my a natural disaster.)

3. Community.

So you raised the idea of each smaller community having duplicates. This is a problem for a platform that wants an aggregate that reaches as many as possible, such as a tech support community. But for social communities, the smaller ones have their own niche. You might not get as much volume in cat pictures (you can always sub to more cat subs if you wish) but the c/cats on your own instance is going to develop it own instance-specific community, where you know each others’ cats by name. Hey @kittypaws@lemmy.meow, how is Madame Biscuits doing today? She seems to like her new bed!

You’re not wrong; I’ve noticed the same. Less ‘horny’ specifically, and more… reasonable and engaged; vs impulsive and reactive.

I think the accessibility of reddit vs Lemmy plays a feature there. Lemmy requires at least some level of tech literacy to understand well enough to use, and it also isn’t where most of the people are. So the people choosing to use Lemmy fully intend to use it; we’re not casual users.

Because it’s so easy to use, I think Reddit has a lot of young and/or immature people (demographics that overlap, but aren’t the same). So it’s full of impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users who aren’t really invested in their communities, that can easily make a new account on a whim, and that create echo chambers with their votes.

It’s not really Reddit’s fault, tbh. It’s an issue of user population, especially when 90% of the users do nothing more than upvote (so generically agreeable things rise) or downvote (anything that challenges them falls). The bigger a user platform gets, the more it homogenises.

Reddit was only unusual in that subreddits let it homogenise on a sub-by-sub basis and create echo chambers; a savvy redditor could still find smaller subs with better discussion (r/patientgamers rather than r/gaming for example). Or subs would get bigger and start becoming hostile or tribal, losing their original mission - and somebody from the old days would make a ‘true’ version (r/childfree vs r/truechildfree).

Lemmy is too small for groupthink to homogenise it (yet?). But particularly large instances could potentially go the same way given enough years. It’s just that Lemmy being federated means that we can make new instances, and defederate from any that we may find unpleasant. I’ve already learned of one portal that isn’t federated to my chosen one.

If by ‘mourn reddit’ you mean ‘process the idea that reddit is as good as dead’ then yes.

I’m not missing it much, though. I like the social engagement part, and I like the getting news part. I used the time-killing part. Lemmy is social engagement and so far it feels much more engaged, more concentrated, less fluff. And the news in Reddit is 1) mostly America-centric anyway and 2) linked from other sources of questionable repute. And time-killing is something I should do less of.

It’s a nice place to find answers and guides, enough so that I use ‘reddit’ as an additional search term if I want relevant, accessible answers that are willing to call out a product’s design for being at fault (if relevant) and suggestion unaffiliated alternatives.

But the communities, the content? I’d barely been engaged there for a year. I loaded it a lot, almost every day; I read it plenty. But I didn’t actually enjoy it very much.

Leaving it behind completely will be difficult when it’s still the best aggregate of user-generated content, at least for now. But actually commenting or posting in it… I’ll be fine.

I plan to, but I also plan to do it fully - going through saved links and bookmarking or documenting relevant recipes/guides/etc, removing all the comment history, etc etc.

I’m not really good at doing that in a timely manner. I have so many big projects, and smaller projects, that have been postponed for so long. It’s just another thing on the list.

Bonus for Lemmy being federated, though - if lemmy.world or lemmy.ml no longer gives users want they’re looking for, you can start your own flangscrawchl.er and choose whether or not you want to federate with them.

Corporations will have their own draw; shittification is a thing they do after they have majority market share and their users are entrenched. A new social network service could rise (even one made by Google for Facebook) that is easy to use, has QoL features that network it with its corporate siblings, etc. It sees increased traffic, it gets big… then it shittifies again.

As long as users are following corporate interests, this cycle continues. It’s a slow-burn likeness of competing ISP sign-up contracts throwing in Xboxes. (Though I hear the US has service deserts, so that mightn’t happen there.)

Lemmy probably won’t shittify to the same degree; while larger servers like Lemmy.ml can house a huge percentage of Lemmy users, it can’t ‘go rogue’ in a way that means anything to Lemmy as a whole.

It also can’t offer the same QoL features a corporatized service can, because those can afford to operate at a loss while building market share. A subsidiary can be used as a ‘loss leader’, ie: it doesn’t matter if it costs more to run than it earns directly, because it gets users into the door for things that do profit.

What you describe can, and mostly likely will happen. But Lemmy’s nature makes it more responsive to user interests.

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I would expect that a platform without an app to push will have a usable mobile-friendly site at least. (Most users are mobile, so it would be strange if they didn’t.)

For those homed on other instances, search !china@latte.isnot.coffee to view the c/ from your home portal.

One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.

I’m rapidly coming to appreciate it.

Maybe it’s the demographic of users (young vs old, tech savvy vs casual, w/e) but threads here have far more activity in ratio to the number of subscribers and members.

Reddit just feels like a popularity context. Tell your ‘I also choose this guy’s dead wife’ joke, get your karma, and for god’s sake DON’T USE EMOJIS! Subs rapidly became echo chambers, or lose identity as they get larger.

Lemmy however… while not all threads have activity (it’s small after all), the activity is legitimately interactive. People actually discussing ideas. We’re talking like thinking adults, and I’m enjoying it.