comfy

From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.

Apparently it was popular in US prisons until it was banned.

Because of the colonization and mining? Didn’t bother me, similarly I don’t like most armies but I can still find a military FPS fun to play.

Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

Seconding, Mindustry is much more visually pleasing to me than Factorio. From the screenshots I’m looking at, Factorio’s graphics just don’t have consistent composition, so elements in the same image look out of place. Shadows aren’t even going in the same direction or logical lengths, and only sometimes they’re pure black giving weirdly high contrast in certain objects and not others. Many environments are various shades of puke colors. The perspective looks weird to me, as if we could turn the map 90 degrees and then all the buildings would look like the leaning tower of Piza.

I would compare and contrast between the original Fallout, perhaps, or as Captain Aggravated here else said, “Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit.”.

Now, whether these are problems or style is a matter of opinion, and furthermore whether it should have an appealing style (as Cpt. Agg also said, pollution is a theme in the game) but some of those points are objectively straying from conventionally appealing elements.

‘ex-4chan users’ isn’t really an important criteria, especially if you’re including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. “Ex-” usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.

But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.

America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that’s not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.

The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it’s important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond “Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.”, especially if you’re on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.

I wouldn’t call the game ‘extremely high difficulty’, it even has some easier levels early on (at least when I played it a couple of years ago). I’m not a regular tower-defense or sim game player and I was able to complete Serpulo. It can be a challenging puzzle at times, but it’s not a game I’d feel a need to warn people about difficulty-wise.

Disclaimer: this game may be addictive for some individuals.

Seconding (although I have a tendency to marathon the campaign of any game I think is excellent). No need for predatory tricks like loots, this is just a damn fun game.

It’s very weird for a FOSS enthusiast not to advertise one of the best open-source games of all time so here I am trying to make it spoken about again.

IIRC I found it in a ‘top 100 FOSS games’ list because it was one of the first which wasn’t an open-sourced cloning of an existing game. No disrespect for clones and adaptations at all, but it’s extra special to see original softwares so good that even people who don’t care about FOSSness would use them.

I love a good FPS and I loved Mindustry.

Thinking of the projects I work on, I don’t understand the value in categorizing by language, rather than theme (~/Development/Web/, ~/Development/Games/) or just the project folders right there.

It turns out, mods are gods.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.

Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it’s theirs.

Moving Forward

­

With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]

On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about “Free” and “Libre”: those names are great for saying “This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]”, and that’s what I’ll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.

IMO, the worst thing about “Minetest” is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It’s certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone’s small hobby project. ‘Luanti’ is much better.

When things get extreme they get similar.

‘Extreme’ is a vague word, but when you’re talking about communism and fascism (or more generally ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’ ideology), that’s a false generalization known as ‘horseshoe theory’.

There are many clear counter-examples when talking about communism, like the entire school of anacho-communist ideologies and the existing societies stemming from them (including the Zapatista territory in Mexico with a population of around 360,000, or the FEJUVE federation in Bolivia, or the many anarchist communes around the world).

As for the more authoritarian versions (Stalinist, Maoist and related ideologies), despite their strong one-party systems, they are still extremely different to fascist ideologies in their goals and how they use their strong state to achieve them. To say ‘they are the same in many respects’ would apply just as equally to liberal capitalist states like the USA and allies, with their infamously militarized police, constant wars and imperial militarism, strong cult of nationalism (for the US, it’s centered on the Founding Fathers), mass imprisonment and state interference in bodily autonomy.

How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.