VeeSilverball
I think it's reasonable for some instances, where there's good alignment. There was a thread I replied in a few days back around how/if TTRPG creators(who are mostly small enthusiasts themselves) could advertise in related magazines, and legitimizing that business wouldn't really pose a conflict for the hobby - that's how it was built in the first place! It's just a matter of finding a place for it and defining the technical solutions.
As a general "let in all the advertisers and promise riches for someone" measure, it does cause known problems. There is some freedom to figure out what works in a specific case here, it's not defined top-down since it isn't centralized.
I do a lot of work in LibreOffice Calc these days - I use it to outline text documents as well as make computations that I can revise. It doesn't need to have tons of features to do what I want it to do, but if you dig into it, it can do some pretty powerful stuff.
Draw is also just fine for making meme text.
They were a borderline necessity on Usenet because there was no protocol linking profiles, just name+email headers. Examples of large ASCII signatures: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/
After that it became more dubious.
What's out there currently is whatever is on midi.org - which I believe has what you want, the Clip File specification, which is accompanied by a not-yet-ready Container File specification(est release in 2024).
That said, even implementing MIDI 1 for sequencing is a huge step in terms of possibilities; the cost of a dynamic soundtrack of the iMUSE/Monkey Island 2 sort, where you can make the entire soundtrack transition smoothly between pre-written clips, is mostly borne in the asset creation process. Either you have to program generative sequences, or you're looking at a composer spending hundreds of hours making transition cues.
What MIDI 2 adds for this task is mostly on the end of recording expression in higher resolution, and that means you are making a higher-fidelity sequencer asset, and programming higher-fidelity synth patches. So the asset cost may go up even further to actually make use of that stuff.
If I were exploring that space again, which I've done in the past, I would aim for one of:
- Sequenced sample playback with a focus on mixing and arranging longer samples and multisampled instruments generatively - a mostly-standard approach
- Discarding the MIDI interface and writing to my own synth engine directly, using a format like ABC to compose.
- Applying generative AI to create a "part player" that embellishes a MIDI sequence(this has some demonstrations but isn't doable in real-time...yet)
The secret to commenting fearlessly is to not read your replies. Most reply-thread conversations are people aggressively talking to themselves to feel like winners. The alternative to engaging like that is to embrace the tendency to self-talk, turn a sensitive thread into an essay prompt for yourself, and don't look back, unless you really feel like getting in an argument that day.
Sometimes you miss good faith engagement that way, but if it's important to keep that, you can add another point of contact.
The thing about larger-scale architecture is that you can be correct in any specific sense that it's more than you need, but when you actually try to make the thing across a development team, you end up there because the code reflects the organization, and having it broken up like that lets you more easily rewrite your previous decisions.
At the small scale this occurs when you notice that the way in which you have to approach a feature is linguistically different - it needs conversion to a substantially different data structure, or an interface that compiles imperative commands from a definition. The whole idea of the database having a general purpose structure and its own query language emerges from that - it lets you defer the question of exactly how you want to use the data. The more configuration you add, the more of those layers you need. When you start supporting enterprise-grade flexibility it gets out of control and you end up with a configuration language that resembles a general purpose programming environment, but worse.
Casey Muratori talks about this kind of thing in some depth.
In the end, the point of the code is to help you "arrive in the future" in some sense - it's instrumental, the point of automating it is to improve the quality of your result by some metric(e.g. fewer errors). For a lot of computations, that means you should just use a spreadsheet - it aids the data entry task, it automates enough of the detail that you can get things done, but it also gets out of the way instead of turning into a professionalized project.
There have been a bunch of changes that make them a little more relevant and engaging, though not to the point where they're everywhere:
- Routing spire(thing that lets you put a tiny spawn pad anywhere you want) now has a 500m range limit, and the spawn is hidden on the minimap so enemies have to either hunt around for it or take down the spire
- Vehicle bases(one-point bases out in open fields) have been turned into silos that automatically generate cortium and change structure ownership when the base is captured
- Base balancing has changed to make them more fun to fight at. Old module system is gone, new module system adds busywork to slot modules into structures. Enemy infantry can attack by overloading the modules and placing cortium bombs in open slots. Automatic defenses are gone, but there are powerful modules like the fortress shield shown that protect the center of the base.
Now the play for a squad that wants to build is to drive into enemy territory, quickbuild some stuff, and then chain pull 12 Lightnings to murder everything nearby, including the other bases. It's the closest the game has gotten to representing control over an area in a literal sense.
Post five things "kbean" makes you think of
Jellybean
Jelly
Jealous
Jam
Rock jam
Kbin is kinda a lot tbh, it's got a bit of a space shuttle control panel thing where the different sections of the ui are modal and you have to remember to configure each one so that you can see e.g. "newest microblogs posted by subscribers to mechanicalpencils". I figured it out after a few hours of stumbling around seeing content and not being sure how I got there.
With respect to how it works in the microblogging corner of Fedi, the tendency is to be actively collaborative, and aggregate some moderation resources, sometimes through backchannels, other times through a tag like #FediBlock - all of which have political implications that have been years-long meta discussions. The emphasis, at least among instances that want to moderate heavily, is on allowing users to feel undisturbed in their own space and not be challenged on literally everything they say, but to still expand that space where it makes sense.
I'm not sure the exact same dynamic will take place over here. The existence of many distinct spaces on the same instance mitigates a major initial problem Mastodon faced in its early waves: when you literally put everyone leaving Twitter on the same public timeline, old grudges spark up and they start campaigns to harass each other off the platform. That's how it came to pass that Mastodon ended up with a ton of user privacy features, and over years, instances warring over ideology and trying to colonize each other, which of course ends in mutual blocking.
In our case I think there's a good chance for small aggregator instances that just "do one thing well" to thrive and see a lot of external traffic, while not having to moderate their entire comments section, since you can opt to not federate that - not your site, not your concern.
Meta attempts to federate and every user is immediately swarmed with bots that tell them to stop using Meta, a baby site for babies, forcing Meta to defederate.