Finished the first season now. It’s really good - I especially love the soundtrack and the calm nature of the first half. It sorta reminds me of the first half of Frieren (before Frieren’s second half which turns into shonen fight stuff 🙄). The second half is really sad… it feels like everything is going wrong all the time and there’s not really a nice resolution. It feels like the characters are struggling a lot but not managing to fix things despite it. It’s kinda sad and frustrating.

I’m really a sucker for happy endings so this style doesn’t really leave me satisfied. It’s not that it ended sadly per se but I wouldn’t exactly call it a happy ending either. How would you say the second season compares?

Watching Ancient Magus Bride now from your recommendation! I had it on the back burner for a while. Five episodes in, it’s good. Still curious what exactly will happen, there’s not too much of an actual plot. But I’m fine with it even if it goes on like this.

Yea I get that - although I kinda like the slow start, it makes the hook all the better. I also wouldn’t have minded Erased going on for a bit longer, I think Steins;Gate is like the perfect length.

Just watched it based on this comment. This anime is seriously good, definitely in my top 5s.

Have you watched Steins;Gate? It definitely has some parallels.

Gurren Lagan

What is so great about this? Just watched the first couple of eps. First impression is not good: It seems like the classical mindless shonen fighting anime alongside pretty childish humor and a distastefully sexualized main female character. Her outfit is literally a bikini and she’s sexualized in the very first scene and in basically every scene she’s in since that one, wtf?

Not better necessarily, just different. But yes, it exists alongside Lemmy. Hopefully in the future there could be many more alternatives.

What an incredibly elitist take. I personally think the fediverse should be welcome to everyone.

There’s definitely a bit of untasteful moe stuff but it’s not a big part of the show. But yea it would be better without it.

Mayushii acting stupid I cannot recognise at all. She’s just extremely genuine and she’s probably way more emotionally intelligent than any other character in the show.

Steins;Gate, can’t believe I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet. It’s good, but do watch at least halfway before you judge it.

Everything on the fediverse really depends on where you go. That’s kinda the whole point.

It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.

This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.

That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There’s nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can’t really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.

I’m personally not 100% convinced that that vision is even possible though tbh.

Sure. But lemmy would still not show Mastodon posts outside communities even if they supported that extension. Both parties need to move towards each other.

ActivityPub is an extensible protocol. It is not just one thing. Lemmy only supports posts that follow that extension I linked above. That extension has a definition and Lemmy follows it so in that way it is “standard”. But it is an extension, not part of the core protocol.

Mastodon and most other fediverse services do not support this extension.

Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.

Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.

This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.

I think Mastodon is very far from standard

I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.

As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?

I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).

You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.

That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.

I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.

It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.

If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions

Isn’t this just Discourse?

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

I don’t see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.

for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal

When is this ever true? The idea of a “universal culture” is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any “universal culture” (it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).