Suppose my reaction to that is “Really? No known cases of schizophrenia among those blind since birth? They should study that.”

You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.

What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it.

I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.

The second is the broader, simpler definition of “anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else.” Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I’ll get to that later.

Is Lemmy part of it or not?

Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.

Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?

Some are, some aren’t. A few examples:

• BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
• Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
• Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don’t federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
• Threads. Meta/Facebook’s Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. …If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?

Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there’s nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we’re both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they’re on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That’s another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they’re replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It’s difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.

Ocarina of Time actually has a rich combat move set. You can horizontal slash, vertical slash, thrust, jump slash, spin slash, jump to the side and backflip. Essentially none of that is ever called for.

Very minor enemies are always vulnerable and you can hurt them however whenever. Some moderate enemies are only weak to certain other weapons. Major enemies, to a fault, are completely damage proof until they make an opening by attacking, and then you can damage them however. Wait for the Wolfos, Lizalfos, Dinalfos, Stalfos, Iron Knuckle, at least a couple others, to attack, they’ll have some cooldown animation during which you can attack them. Bosses, from Ghoma to Ganon, require fending off their attacks, stunning with a special weapon, and then slashing with the sword.

In the words of Egoraptor, “There’s so much. Goddamn waiting. In Ocarina.”

They had ideas they couldn’t realize for another decade and a half in 1998. They only realized an actual organic combat system in Breath of the Wild.

Zelda II, the problem with Adventure of Link is it’s unfair. They place enemies in such a way that you’ll go to make a jump, you’ll get hit by an enemy you couldn’t see, and fall down a death pit while stun-locked. You don’t really beat it by getting good at it, you beat it by memorizing all the bullshit.

(Funny thing is, most of that is from ALttP’s manual. If you haven’t, go find it and read it, the first 4 or 5 pages read like a design document for the rest of the series)

I mean, that game contains the in-universe creation myth, the origin story of the series’ main villain, the establishment of four recurring in-universe races of people, and a host of ideas they’re still riffing on to this day…but this is Lemmy, no non-existent homoerotica will be left uninvented.

No mine is more of just a bell sound, because it heard the complaints from players about it talking all the time but it took it too literally.

Before watching, is this going to be A Fistful Of Rupees?

No, it’s some shit GuruLarry did? And Fistful Of Rupees isn’t up on Youtube anymore? But here it is on Dailymotion?

My back pain is why I lost my mind.

How’s your back?

That’s kind of my point. in BOTW and TOTK, the story is thin on the ground.

Literally. It’s thin, and it’s on the ground.

I’ve watched streamers who played BOTW first then play earlier games, and reacted with surprise at how much lore was in them.

I don’t see it failing, sheer force of brand recognition will fill theaters. I’m just not sure they’ll get anything good done.

Anyone else feel like the time for this was 2008? Circa Twilight Princess? Fans were clamoring for a movie back then because the games hit peak “cinematic” around that time, TP directly references events of OoT, it feels like a continuity, a single story.

Now? They’ve done so much with the franchise that it’s become a paint color like Star Wars. Is there an appetite for it like there was 20 years ago?

Humanity’s first chance to test the effects of the Van Allen belts on a Canadian.

On the surface, that works. Problem is, to use the Fediverse you have to get a bit deeper into it than with email.

Email is designed to evoke the UX of the physical post office. To use the post office, or email, you need to know your address, and your recipients address. You need to know where to put outgoing letters, and where to get incoming letters. Even if you’re vaguely aware of Grumman LLVs and letter sorting machines and trucks and trains and whatnot, you can still get away with conceptualizing it as, you put a letter in a box, it is then “In the mail” until it is delivered to the recipient. Email presents itself to the end user as exactly that.

ActivityPub might be “just another protocol” like smtp or pop3 or whatever but the user experience is vastly different in ways people really haven’t had to deal with before. Lemmy isn’t lke the post office, it’s like Reddit, except there’s 90 little Reddits each with their own slightly different rules and a complex web of which will communicate with what. The format of the electronic communique is of no consequence to the end user.

On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.

The several apps thing I don’t see as much of a barrier to Redditors; most are already used to the platform’s official app being garbagepuke and going with something else so they’ll figure that out relatively quickly.

I haven’t yet seen the “Pick an instance to sign up with. It doesn’t matter, well actually it does, for reasons we’re not explaining right now” problem really addressed in a meaningful way. Those lists of instances to join when you go to Lemmy or pixelfed or whoever’s website? Most of them don’t get filled out correctly by instance admins; so they’re either the default boiler plate, or they’re the first two-thirds of the first sentence of a paragraph about what Lemmy is.

Lemmy.world

Lemmy is an open source, federated link aggregator platform powered by ActivityPub, the fastest growing…

If they’d get off their asses and invent anything, we might. They plagiarized themselves into modernity. If it weren’t for the US they’d be spending the 21st century dying of smallpox by candlelight. Without them we’d recall fewer products for heavy metal contamination.

For having copied our homework for 80 years?

Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have linux@lemmy.world, linux@lemmy.ml, linux@sh.itjust.works, linux@feddit.org…

So “Join an instance for a community you’re interested in”…not sure if that’s tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain’t on Lemmy.

I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries’ mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content…one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there’s a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren’t in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I’m a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate…within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet…Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just…Can; abstract as it is it’s a thing this collection of software can do.

I’m not sure you can define “the biggest bubble” in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it’s used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn’t ideal but I’m pretty sure that’s an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it’s a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there’s some of it we can’t see because the middle is in the way, and there’s nowhere in it where that isn’t true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon…I don’t know, I don’t actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I’ll leave to someone else to answer.

The email analogy just goes so far, because of mental models.

Yeah, those of us who have opinions on sudo vs doas will get it. Email is a protocol standard that allows different servers to exchange compatible data. Most people don’t conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. The USPS, Royal Mail and others are one entity that most end users just handwave away as “in the mail” and their only concern is where do I go to send and receive my mail? Your mailbox is at the post office on the corner of Road st. and Boulevard ave. Your email inbox is at gmail.com. Gmail, or hotmail, or whatever, is your local post office for putting things “in the mail.”

Nobody conceptualizes social media like that. Social media is a place you go to be among other people. Back in my day we called them “Sites.” Myspace and Facebook were “sites.” Places you went. Now they call them “apps” but they’re still conceptualized as where the people participating in this culture are. Get it through the average Tiktokker’s head that you get the Loops app, and then you have to pick a server to connect that app to. “Just get me to Loops.”

Some servers are full, some you have to apply for, some are perfectly open to join. They all connect to each other, except they can choose not to, and choosing not to connect to each other is why some servers exist in the first place. We’re going to present you with a list of instances to join, you’ll be presented with the instance’s logo, which half of them left blank so you get a boilerplate image, a blue checkmark on every single one which carries no meaning it just looks social media-y, and the top sentence and a half of a description which is either default text or a description of the platform as a whole because it wasn’t explained to the instance admins what this description field was for.

So, new user who probably still isn’t sure how this works, make a decision about something that feels kind of abstract that we’ve done a really bad job of explaining.