I’ve had it take up to a week for a community to show up after I’ve searched for it.

Do note that you can’t currently message users on other instances from kbin. The button will still be there, but it will bring you back to the homepage. I believe Ernest said something about it being “unimplemented,” so I’m assuming cross-instance messaging will happen someday, but is probably not a high priority at the moment.

I probably would have enjoyed what little I did of Utopia much better with a guide. Half of my playtime was spent trying to figure out which button to press to get my current goal to pop back up on the screen again. (The other half was spent running around looking for an alternate source of carbon, because I got distracted while going out to mine for it and started mining other things that I didn’t actually need and promptly rendered myself unable to mine anything at all.)

So yeah, I think it’s safe to say that having something to refer to to see exactly what I should be doing at any given moment would be helpful for me. Thanks for the links.

When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they’re going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account.

This is my main concern.

Personally, I don’t care if the fediverse grows. I just care what it grows into. The fediverse has a nice community at the moment because everybody on it made a conscious decision to be here and not somewhere else. Threads users will not have made that decision. Furthermore, they’ll outnumber the rest of us enough as to have no incentive to try and fit into the preexisting community here (which isn’t helped by the fact that they’ve already been their own isolated community for awhile).

I second all the suggestions except the currently reading/online one: in my experience, seeing “currently reading” statistics just makes dead places feel more dead. It’s also not a useful statistic: it doesn’t tell you how good a post is, or provide any information about the poster, or even show how popular it is (because you can’t really extrapolate about the average engagement from only one datapoint). You can’t do anything with the number.

Yes, you do.

You can also connect to non-kbin sites, including Lemmy and Mastodon! They all use the same protocol to be able to talk to each other.

On forums, people maybe be just talking about the thing that the forum is about. For example, if you’re on a forum about Minecraft or cats, you’re not going to be discussing differing political opinions — in fact, such conversations are usually frowned upon. This is different from your real life community, where you’re going to be talking about all sorts of different topics.

A lot of real-life communities restrict discussions about politics too, and for similar reasons to online communities (not wanting to be broken apart by angry discussion). What I got from the video was that positive interaction with somebody you disagree with — even if, or maybe especially if, that interaction isn’t actually about the source of the disagreement — is more important than actually facing the disagreement head-on, which usually just serves to make everybody angrier and more convinced of their own points.

My thoughts: I’m in a lot of small communities online (mostly forums and discord servers), and the ones I enjoy the most are the ones that are generally populated by people who have similar worldviews and cultural values, and that prohibit discussion of extreme points from the “other side” — not because I don’t want to challenge my worldview, but because I think those communities challenge my worldview more. Spending time in them makes me feel positive about other human beings. I respect the people in them who have different opinions from me, and frequently have conversations with them that change my own opinion a bit.

On the other hand, going into the default feed on a larger social media site is like being hit in the face and then told that I’m supposed to be considering whether maybe I deserved to be hit in the face, really, which isn’t something I usually feel particularly disposed to do. Sites like mastodon have enough controls to be able to make your feed into something that at least isn’t actively radicalizing, but it means you can’t follow anybody who disagrees with you, because those posts will be mixed in with anything from them that you actually do want to see. Your feed isn’t like a forum with its own set of social norms about what kind of content is acceptable to post in what context. People you follow can’t read the room before they post because the room isn’t visible to them in the first place. So I do think that forums are much more conducive to being deradicalizing than a lot of other forms of social media, just because the nature of having distinct communities with separated pools of posts makes it a lot easier to interact with people you disagree with in situations where you agree with and respect them. But it also relies on the forum having the right rules and moderation — just being a forum isn’t enough for it to be a healthy and respectful community.

@Damaskox All I could find for instance rules for kbin.social is “Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to remove any content or user that violates these guidelines.” (from the tos)

Good to know that microblog posts show up on lemmy, although it’s a bit awkward that (if I’m seeing that correctly) they show up as regular threads there. I might mention them in a thread that’s not as closely directed to them instead. Thanks for the reply. :)

It’s usually easier to search via external sites (https://lemmyverse.net/ and https://browse.feddit.de/ are the ones I’ve been using). You’ll still have to manually copy over the magazine name in order to subscribe for it, but you’ll get a wider variety of results without having to go to each instance individually.

The Kbin Usability Pack userscript adds a bookmark feature: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469597-kbin-usability-pack

Yeah, I installed a few drivers manually and then came across one that was, for some reason, only available via the newest kernel and not as a separate piece of software. I’d have updated the kernel before that one if I’d realised that it might have been able to fix my issues, but it hadn’t come up as a possible solution until then. If you do figure all that out before actually installing the os, you’ll probably have a better time than I did. :)

This is a rather old post, but given that you’ve not received any answers yet, I hope replying isn’t too inappropriate.

For the first question, I back up my files on a NAS using rsync. It’s a command-line solution, but I stored the command in a .desktop file to make an icon in my app list that I can just click to back everything up to the correct places. Makes it easy, and wasn’t too difficult to implement.

Your second question might depend on your hardware. I just set up a new laptop on linux mint and had to do significant amounts of troubleshooting, all of it involving the command line, because linux mint didn’t come with or know about most of the drivers required. If you’re using an older or more well-supported computer, it might work better out of the box. Most troubleshooting will probably be command-line, but there’s a lot of support out there for that if you need it.

App-wise linux mint has a fairly robust software manager (app store) with a wide variety of apps on it that, for the most part, don’t require a lot of troubleshooting. (I only recently switched over to mint from Ubuntu, and was impressed at how many apps you could access so easily, including a large variety of unofficial releases of software that isn’t officially available on linux). Unless you’re intent on building obscure software from source, installing and using applications should be fairly painless.

I can’t speak to the stability of mint, since I haven’t been using it for long enough. However, I used Ubuntu for five or six years and never had to reinstall it, so you could always look into Ubuntu if stability is important to you.

There’s a userscript I’m using that provides a bookmark feature (among other things, most or all of which I think are toggleable): https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469597-kbin-usability-pack

No built-in feature as far as I know, though.

I’ve been doing similar; been using Firefox, but Chrome is installed for its browser-wide automatic captioning. Not something I need often, but I rely on it for the occasional remote meeting here and there. I’m sure free automatic captioning applications exist for my operating system, but I’d have to actually test each one to see if they actually work, and it’s just been so convenient keeping Google’s around.

(Speaking of which, if anybody happens to have recommendations for free automatic captioning software that works on Ubuntu, I seem to be in the market…)