It really wasn't, sadly.

The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that's typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.

From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn't happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.

A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they've been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.

Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I'm very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.

So, yeah. :/

Kinda nasty that the artist credit got rubbed out.

So, altho I thought this was Jim Benton's work at first, I do believe this one is by Mike Jacobsen of Oz. His stuff from this era is here, and more modern stuff here:

https://www.semisupers.com/
https://www.instagram.com/seemikedraw/

I think it's a nested joke, where that one game totally dominates the kid's free time, with the clueless parents thinking that's the only relevant game in existence.

There's also the running concept (or dada-ist joke) that Wondermark's dodos are completely obsessed with the concept of time, with the implication being that they squandered their time in life, perhaps ultimately aiding in their extinction.

Example:
https://wondermark.com/c/1543/

I remember this craziness.

I remember that craziness because as a young adult, I was working nearby and saw the smoke clouds.

...and of course, it was all considered ok.

I'm unaware of anyone at all those days who considered it 'all okay.' On the contrary, it put a kind of national spotlight on Philly police' brutality going back to the Rizzo days, and doubtless contributed to Rizzo never being mayor again. And I think even amongst the folks who believed the bombing was justified, a large segment had to admit that it obviously went very, very wrong.

All that said-- yeah, as a nation I'm not sure we learned a damn thing out of all that. The police certainly didn't appear to.

I may be missing something here

I would guess Larson wasn't a fan, and thought that "new age" practices were mainly performative and non-productive, leading practitioners to get stuck in repetitive little circles, getting nothing done in the end.

If so, it's a pretty cynical take IMO, and certainly one of his more personal, brassy ones.

Came here to make this point.
The CCP's version of "communism" is almost a textbook example to me of how an interesting system that can work beautifully on the local level can be completely betrayed and turned in to something much more like an oligarchy.

I don't understand how someone of reasonable knowledge and judgement could possibly be a tankie in 2024.

no idea why the Institute for the Study of War hasn't been mentioned yet

they issue regular reports on the world's hot spots, and in the case of the ukraine war, nightly summaries of all events during the previous 24hrs

https://www.understandingwar.org/

LW is a huge instance with lots of great communities, content and members.

If we blocked every useful instance just because a nasty troll lurked under its bridge, then what would be the point of trying to participate in a healthy Fediverse?

I thought his smugness worked... for a while. He's been right on a great many things across his career, and was able to frame his scathing critiques in fairly unique, clever ways. (and/or his writers were) Indeed, at one time I admired his ability to look at things from pretty daring angles, even if he was sometimes way off.

Problem is, he's not the same anymore. Sort of like Joe Rogan, who at least started out with honest, interesting, amusing takes in a sort of 'college student+' kind of way. But something seems to have happened to these guys across the years. Not just the wealth, but the growing insulation from reality and.. the normalisation of right-wing extremism. Something like that, anyway.

Still, I can't just forget that Maher was killing it for plenty of years, there, even if he did rub people the wrong way.

@https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto

Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.

Yes, I understand it's already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.

As part of that, backing up the community's many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.

Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.

Anyway, that's for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I'm going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that's good for starters!

you can go to /instances to see a list of other connected and blocked instances.

I just did, and noticed a bunch of supposedly-federated mastodon instances, but in reality I've never seen them in my 'all' stream.

Are they not supposed to show up there?

I'm the founder of the community in question, and one of the first things I noticed is that an admin @[email protected] restored some of the posts even while OP was still banned. Unfortunately their action was useless what with the images being blocked or deleted from LW.

So I reached out to that person a day or two ago, and have heard nothing but crickets, so far. EDIT: They responded just now, altho it sounds a lot like they don't know much about the issue. Credit to them for trying to help, however.

It also appears my colleague still hasn't received any meaningful response.

Point is-- I don't understand this business of volunteering for a public-facing role and then either neglecting or refusing to communicate with users who've been wronged for one reason or another.

They are well within copyright in terms of timeline. Anything after 1927 can and likely is subject to copyright. I don’t like it but that’s how it works. Given that they are images from trading cards, it would not surprise me if the rights holder was enforcing copyright through a third party service.

Granted, but I don't think that was the issue in this case. The Moebius images in question were arbitrarily removed/blocked, with most being zapped, but others remaining.

For the record, none of the many other copyrighted images were removed, either.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Well then they'd have a plate of them, like tiny caviar. :D

And then all they do is pay for the bare cost of the ingredients.

They could have tipped an extra $1000 and made a lot of people cheer. But no....

Seems like millions of redditors say just that through the many slaps in the face to users, then hang around anyway. :S

Heck yeah!

I've seen a lot of these 'hybrid animal' pieces, and his is easily some of the best. Not just due to his obvious technical skills, but I find he has a gift for picking some pretty awesome mashup subjects. Each one also doubles as a sort of a hilarious zinger to me, especially the "Corcenga" piece. XD

Anyway yeah, I probably have a few dozen hours in to GIMP, and there's no way I could produce stuff as smooth as this excellent artist did.

Doesn't sound that far from Shepard's Pie though, a tasty dish beloved by zillions.

both choices suck

What puerile nonsense.

Trump already demonstrated that he was a complete disaster and Russian asset, and I hate linking to the evil empire, but:

r/WhatBidenHasDone