JohnnyEnzyme

joined 4 weeks ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Thanks! IIRC I hit up the 3rd, but didn't know about the first two. Adding...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago

Wow, wonderful.

I'm kind of curious about what the Russian card game is on the left, but it seems a bit elusive based on a search.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 points 6 days ago (6 children)

IIRC, 24 users were immediately transferred over here because they'd originally subscribed to the old EGN via their PieFed.Social accts, a nice little perk of the transfer tool.

So it looks like 72 more have signed up since, I suppose down to the little bit of 'advertising' I did here & there, plus word of mouth. Yay! My biggest hope of course is that most (or all) of our future posts will be seen on the collective "ALL" streams across our mutually connecting services, i.e. Lemmy, PieFed, and whatever else, because that's mainly how we built up the original user base, I believe.

But yeah, I suspect you're exactly right-- most of our total subscribers at the old place were in fact defunct, which was to be expected, really. That said, total subscribers still has some positive impact in various ways, just one of which was to help boost visibility in tools like this:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=graphic+novels

EGN+ used to be the #2 result there when searching "graphic novels," and user count definitely played a role in the formula. By being #2, we had more visibility, which I do believe helped drive even more subscriptions.

Anyway, I'm not trying to kvetch so much as try to explain how the loss of even defunct subscribers can still hurt where it counts. But... we'll see what happens. 🥲

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

] > https://discuss.tchncs.de/ is managed by the admin behind https://tchncs.de/ , as you can see, they offer quite a few services: https://status.tchncs.de/status/tchncs

Thanks; cool stuff. I just hope there's enough resiliency and backup in terms of personnel, such that such projects can go on indefinitely.

] > In your situation, have you ever considered hosting a blog rather than content directly on Lemmy/Piefed? That might be an easier way to manage the content over time.

Well, there's the rub-- by no means did I set out to create a blog-like project, rather that's what it happened to drift towards over time. My main intent was to create as close an alternative to r/bandedessinee as possible due to Reddit's self-immolation at the time. I didn't want it to be about me, but about community participation, eventually with other people overseeing the project, with myself being more of an occasional contributor. This is doubly the case due to significant health issues and living in a place currently drifting towards... some pretty disastrous general outcomes.

But yes, I've tried doing a couple blogs for awhile. I frankly prefer the Reddit/FV approach because I don't have to be as perfectionistic, 'complete,' and me-centred, plus it let's me work more in a style intended to get general discussion rolling.

As I said above, if PieFed / etc eventually offered the ability to assign transferred content with matching usernames to the new account, that would pretty much solve things for me. Or if the community owner had the ability to modify old content (showing that in a public log of course), then it would also solve things. I don't feel like I'm hoping for too much here, but maybe I'm wrong...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Good point, but one which also maybe shows how this kind of thing can be completely arbitrary. I.e., there's nothing else in English that sounds like "tor-til-a," so in most ways it doesn't really matter, same as with the Texan city of Amarillo.

"Guerilla," however...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

IIRC as the article already mentioned, these were the kind of his moves that were quite unique, experimental and even trail-blazing. I thought the first SW was a pretty interesting yarn, even if this kind of thing later got turned in to a product. But that was going to be the case, regardless. Anything successful was always going to be imitated until turned in to product.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

His tenure was marked by stories of creative blowups and controversies, including his insistence that the X-Men character Phoenix had to die to atone for crimes she committed in the story, over the objections of the creative team.

I thought this was a great, ballsy move, actually. IP owners naturally want to milk their product for as long as possible, but this was a real indication that Shooter wanted to go in more realistic directions. The real problem wasn't in killing her off IMO, it was in later teams endlessly bringing her back from the dead.

In 1987, after Marvel had been acquired by New World Pictures, Shooter, whose welcome was already wearing thin, was, by some accounts, fired for demanding editorial autonomy and the payment of royalties.

“He really polarized people, but it was because he had a passion for what he was doing,” said Bill Sienkiewicz, who drew Moon Knight and New Mutants during the 1980s. “He went to bat for freelancers in a way you don’t see many people in editorial roles do today.”

Some might call him draconian, or an AH, but I think these two moves say a lot about him wanting to look after the creators and not just to go in the 'comics as economic product' direction.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

] > About the most robust and resilient instance, I'm not sure, monthly reports on !home@lemmy.zip are pretty transparent and detailed. Other instances like sh.itjust.works have very high uptime as well.

Yeah, the reason I say that is because Sunaurus had setup something like 10 sub-servers (most of them non-redundant) running the instance, at a cost of ~US$200/mo. I can't pretend to be any expert in such stuff, but my perception is that (rather famously unlike certain other instances) it was overall beautifully able to handle massive influxes of users, DDOS attacks, spam issues, outage issues, and whatever else. It also had a health-status link (now defunct) and I think maybe other user/server tools, as well.

So while I grasp the intrinsic, resilient nature of the FV, Lemm.ee to me was one of the strongest instances there was, and it can never be too good when such as those go down.

To me, it also kind of touches on certain problems of dead communities only getting conserved in 'ghost states' by the FV. I mean yes, you can still see them if you know how to look, but they can't be interacted with, and they'll never pop up in any feeds. They won't disappear, but I'm pretty sure that very few people are going to bother visiting them unless the content is absolutely stellar.

Another issue apart from that is that even when the content can be migrated to another instance, nobody can say with any certainty that such instance won't crash, either. There's also the fact that now that EGN's stuff is mostly migrated (with ~160 postings lost), I can't actually edit any of it even as the community owner. So personally, it's another big chonk of work trying to patch up any content that has aging issues... such as Imgur content needing to be re-uploaded, info updating, and/or links needing to be fixed. I.e., I'll need to delete, rework and re-launch so many of those aging posts when I'd much rather be focused on creating new content.

So from my POV, the situation is still a bit fraught, with the most obvious thing seemingly being migration tools needing to be improved, and community-owner tools needing a little more power. Now over on Reddit, people could say something like 'yeah yeah, I sold my soul to Spez, but at least we don't have any of those issues.'

So maybe if and when Reddit sets itself on fire again, the FV can be better-prepared to persuade users over. (knock on wood)

/rant?

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I guess the unstated joke is that "guerilla" is in fact pronounced like "geh-r-riya."

When I was younger, for some reason I thought it was pronounced like a large ape species.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

My sense is that the article (and people in general) are dismissing the loss a little too easily. Here are my thoughts:

  • IIRC it was the #3 instance by size in the entire FV. That's not nothing, and a lot of people were no doubt impacted.
  • It was probably the most robust and resilient instance across the entire FV.
  • The site-runner was a real pro at technical matters, and notably helped other instances deal with tech issues early on.
  • The reason why the place went down, i.e. burnout and harassment across it's admin team, is something to be concerned about across the FV going forward. It's also something of an argument that for-profit social media networks (such as Reddit) have some key advantages over volunteer-based, FV-style networks.
[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Shit-comment: I sometimes wonder, when ~~people~~ English-speakers pronounce the word audibly or just in their heads, do they actually visualise small bands of gorillas fighting off larger human armies? Are they making a Planet of the Apes connection? :D

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago

Credit to @wolfinthewoods@lemmy.ml for nudging me in this direction, some weeks back.

Of course, with the number of game recommendations I still have to add, I might have to compact that section in to little more than small image links to the games. Otherwise, the OP might get to be pretty massive.

Ah, decisions, decisions...

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