They banned Hexbear.

Rest up! I worry about what this place will look like on July 1st, when Reddit shuts off API access entirely.

Mastodon is “too confusing”, don’t you know??

It really seems like that’s the one area that ActivityPub in general could work on, though. It’s hard to change instances (I jumped from lemmy.ml to beehaw.org, for example, but you really can’t tell). Because it’s hard to change instances, choosing an instance is a pretty big choice.

But if instance-hopping was made easy… well, then you could have a default instance people land on that they could try out. Think of it like a Linux Live USB for the Fediverse. Just give them a neutral “default” and then offer them a way to filter into a smaller instance if they wanted.

That’s what BlueSky is leaning into, and I wish Mastodon had done the same. Lemmy kinda has this with lemmy.ml, but that’s more of an accident than anything else.

Yep, and the fact that Lemmy is open-source means that an instance like Beehaw can always fork it if needed.

But thankfully they do a fairly good job of at least giving other people a place to avoid. Even on lemmy.ml itself they’re really not bad, despite technically having a lot of overlap. It’s like how you don’t go on certain boards on 4chan.

If you go to https://beehaw.org/instances, you’ll see a big list of instances which are allowed…

…and one that is explicitly blocked.

See, Lemmy caught on with certain groups very early on. The main Lemmy instance has always been left-leaning. But one group that really latched on to Lemmy from the extremely early days was tankies.

These guys have their own community, “Lemmygrad” - IIRC, their servers are even based in China, or they claim to be. They were the most active users of Lemmy before Reddit shot themselves in the foot, and their influence has been felt across a lot of the other instances. If you ever went to GenZedong on Reddit, you get an idea of what they’re like. (There’s even a version of that subreddit on Lemmygrad.)

One reason why I switched to Beehaw is because they’ve blocked that instance. If you’re on the “main” lemmy.ml instance run by the developers and you go to your version of /r/all, you’ll see posts from Lemmygrad show up pretty frequently - because Lemmygrad still has a fairly large community, and they’re still pretty active relative to the size of Lemmy itself.

If people go to join-lemmy.org like they’re “meant” to, they’ll almost certainly see Lemmygrad at the top of the instance list. Anecdotally, a lot of Redditors see that and get turned off, thinking this place is full of tankies. (And, to be fair… before everyone from Reddit started showing up, a lot of Lemmy was full of tankies…)

Even on Lemmy itself, there’s a lot of people who dislike that side of the project. They’re authoritarian at best, and genocide deniers at worst. And the people who created Lemmy are at least sympathetic to them, even if they don’t outright endorse it publicly.

But. Lemmy is open-source. No one person or ideology can control the project, as it can always be forked. Even the creators of Lemmy itself have no control over what happens at Beehaw. So steering people away from the tankie side of Lemmy and towards a more, uh, “normal” instance is for the best, especially since this place needs to grow if it’s to be taken seriously as a Reddit competitor.

Beehaw has chosen to step away from that drama by explicitly banning that instance, hence why I’ve been sending people on Reddit here instead of mentioning join-lemmy.org.

Reddit has a whole team of people who delete content. Because they’re a company, as well, individual people can’t be arrested by the FBI if they fail to do their job.

Before Reddit hosted images themselves, though, there was Imgur. I know Imgur was small - I’m not sure how they dealt with this sort of stuff. The answer may be “they didn’t and just got lucky”.

159 and climbing!

It’s already one of the top posts of all time. 😉

Yeah, people come from all over. Game dev isn’t just “make the game”; there’s other things to think about too.

If you’re making a multiplayer “live service” title then you have to deal with things like AWS or Azure, and everything that comes with that. Tools engineers write the tools that get used to make a game, and generally those tools have nothing to do with the game itself - they’ll be written in Rust or Python or whatever.

Cybersecurity in gaming is a little more niche. The closest thing you have to it are anticheat guys; they’re usually “reformed” (or so they claim… I have my doubts 😉) cheat developers. They’ll try to hack our own game and tell us what they find, and we adjust to counter their hacking. Of course if a game does in-app payments you have to worry about wallets and such getting hacked, and if it’s something like EA where people have their own accounts you gotta handle that too.

And of course - there’s nothing that says you have to keep doing the same thing forever. You can always change what you specialize in and enter a new part of the field - or enter a new field entirely. One of our tools engineers was actually a construction worker 10 years ago, believe it or not.

Hello!

I’ve been a Redditor for 11 years - I was even in the Century Club subreddit (it’s not nearly as interesting as you probably think it is).

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series, but EA laid me off earlier this year as part of them shutting down my former studio. Now I’m working on a new AAA title I can’t really talk about.

Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland! I used to be a skipper on the World-Famous Jungle Cruise. I also worked as a host at the Tiki Room (fun fact: technically, this is considered part of the Jungle Cruise), a conductor on the Disneyland Railroad, and an “archaeologist” on the Indiana Jones ride they have there (although I disliked working Indy).

As a hobby, I have a model train layout. It’s in N-Scale (1:160). I’m also part of a local model railroad club that periodically meets up and puts together modular layouts. We meet at local convention centers and whatnot, where we string together a bunch of 4x2-foot layout sections that we each individually own/maintain and make one big mega-layout.

I’m super excited to be here!

I’ve also been recommending Beehaw to people on Reddit because they’re less likely to run into, uh, certain people from certain other Lemmy instances.

I finally deleted my account yesterday. I was one of the earliest Twitter users, so it was hard to say goodbye.