Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we are down an Ash but have the triumphant return of Kodra from Origins. This week we talk about the self-DDoS of Twitter and Kodra chimes in on the return of P-Speed to a new Super Mario Game. From there we talk a bit about the newly announced Guild Wars 2 expansion Secrets of the Obscure. Kodra gives us a bit of a run down on his experiences at Origins and how he has finally played in the most ubiquitous LARP Vampire the Masquerade. We are somewhat incredulous as for several of us… that is the ONLY LARP we have ever participated in. Grace gets bit by the Honkai Star Rail bug finally and talks a bit about their experiences. Nimona is out and we talk a bit about the steps it took to get to this point as well as a bit about the mixed bag that is The Little Mermaid live-action film. Finally, we wrap things up with a quick topic about Microprose actually still existing in some form and gobbling up former properties like getting back the license to Falcon.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve not really talked about it here on the blog, but for a while now I have been helping with the operation of Gamepad.club. Recently there have been some situations in the greater Fediverse where instance Administrators have gone missing leading to periods of significant degradation in operation and instance culture. Due to these wider concerns, Gazz wanted to protect the instance from ever being in a situation where an administrator could not be reached. I was asked and I agreed to help around with the instance. The variance in our operating times helps us catch those sign-ups and approve them a bit faster. So if you have any questions or concerns about Gamepad.club feels free to hit me up through any of my many social channels. I’m not really around on Twitter anymore so if you reach out there, it is going to take a while for me to even notice.
I have to admit I had been somewhat hesitant to talk too broadly about my role as an administrator on Gamepad.club not because I was ashamed to talk about it, but more because I wanted to spare the instance any undue heat. I had a fairly significant falling out with the Administrator of another gaming instance that launched last November. Largely I was trying to keep from our small home drawing her spite and her blocking the instance. However, I feel like I have been walking on eggshells since the events surrounding the launch of that instance and my being removed from the moderation team. When the same exact things happened to the other moderator of the instance, I just got tired of trying to be cautious. I will not let that bullshit that we dealt with damage my joy when it comes to the fediverse any longer. I feel safer on Gamepad than I did on other instances, because I have known Gazz for so many years, and he also knows me.
We’ve not had what I would consider meteoric growth, but it has been steady growth nonetheless. I think the great social media land run is more or less over, and folks who would be willing to leave Twitter already have their flag planted on some instance here. Most of our growth has been folks migrating from other instances because they wanted a more chill local feed. Truth be told the great thing about the Fediverse is that there is no real reason why anyone needs to be on any specific server. More than anything it is about choosing your local feed and maybe having a “cool address” behind your name. We’ve thrown out a placard and announced that we were open for business, and folks have answered that call a few at a time. Even I put off moving entirely for a while because it is a bit of a hassle to uproot yourself and plant yourself in a new place… even when you feel like that new place will be a better home.
I have to admit I am honestly fine with having a bit of a personal touch to our home, rather than trying to bring in thousands of people. None of us are trying to make a living off running an instance, but instead just trying to carve out a comfy home for ourselves in this new social landscape. The really cool thing about where we are now in the fediverse is that you can maintain a small instance, yet still have a good federation with thousands of other instances. I think last I knew we were federating actively with some 9000 other instances. Small instances that are not terribly well federated have issues with hashtags and the like, but so far the handful that I follow habitually are still introducing me to new people. I admit I was a bit concerned about that by moving away from one of the “stuxlikes”, but I’ve not really seen any tangible difference. I don’t think Patreon fully covers the operating expenses but if nothing else it is putting a decent dent in them.
So far things seem to be trucking along swimmingly. There has been a bit of weirdness when someone migrates from an instance we have not had migrations from before. We aren’t entirely certain what is going on there but it settles out after a few minutes. Essentially when you migrate from another instance there is a flurry of activity as the new server handshakes with both the old server and every server that you were following folks on. The whole “moving” instance thing is relatively new as in the past the only option you had was to export the list of folks you were following and then import that list into the new home. Previously there was no means to move followers, and the new process essentially asks for permission from every instance. If it succeeds the instance has the person who was following you previously follow your new account and then unfollow your old account. This works great so long as every server is running the same version of Mastodon, but largely falls apart when you are talking about other fediverse variants like Pixelfed, Pleroma, Misskey, etc.
Because of the voluntary nature of server migration and follower moves, this is in part why I always suggest folks export all of their data manually to CSV so that they can fall back to importing those if anything does not go as planned. In a worst-case scenario, you can then manually import everyone you were following, and hope the nature of the fediverse takes hold and they follow you on the new account. Server migrations are commonplace enough that rarely does anyone really bat an eye when someone jumps instances. More than anything the ability to change instances provides a self-healing characteristic that you just don’t have in another environment. If an instance gets stale, too busy for your tastes, or is unsustainable by the administration team… then you can move your home and in most cases, the entire process takes less than fifteen minutes from start to finish. Instances sign onto the Mastodon Server Covenant as we have as a way of providing at least three months’ notice if an instance needs to shut down.
Right now we are going through a rather public scenario where a large instance is shutting down. Currently, folks are using this as an excuse to decry the failure of Mastodon. For me, I largely view it as the system succeeding because instance admins have thrown out the welcome mat to make sure the folks from Mastodon.lol needing a new home can find one easily. Migration is one of those things that is just built into the Mastodon experience. I’ve shared the entire history of my instances before, but Gamepad.club is my tenth instance and in each case, I had perfectly valid reasons to move. That isn’t to say you need a reason other than “I want to” and the beautiful thing is that after awhile folks understand that the nature of the fediverse involves people shifting into more comfortable positions. I would never put the hard sell on anyone to migrate to any instance because so long as there is no defederation nonsense at work, we will be able to talk freely no matter where you end up.
Anyways long post that went in a bunch of different directions as often mine do. I’m helping out with the operations of Gamepad.club and while I’m technically an administrator I still very much take my lead from Gazz. I mostly help out with tedious things like loading emojis and helping to approve account submissions, but am there to step in if there ever comes a need for me to take a more active role. It is a good home and we’d love to have you, but also there is no pressure to move if you are happy where you currently “live” on the fediverse.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! The gang is all back at the same time… just in time to take a break effectively until after the new year. Because of how the holidays fall this year, we will not be recording shows for the next few weeks and returning after that with our usually two-part Games of the Year show.
This week we talk about more Twitter Madness and the time when a journalist misread the now-banned JoinMastodon account and created a fictitious person named John Mastodon that runs Mastodon. From there we talk about Tam’s epic journey in trying to find some way to comfortably use a push-to-talk key while playing games on a controller. We talk a bit about a few 2D games on the Steam Deck specifically Ghost Song and Salt and Sanctuary. After that, we talk about our progress in the Path of Exile Forbidden Sanctum league and just how much madness is associated with learning that game in general. Finally, we talk about playing Justin Roiland’s High On Life, a game about talky gunfriends.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve talked about Tripod before, the poorly named three-legged calico that lives in my backyard and has done so for the last three years. Lately, she has been doing something new and it is sort of adorable. I always feed in the mornings, but I don’t always feed in the evenings. There are some times however when she decides that she wants food and is going to tell me about it. This is a shot from our security camera from last night with Tripod highlighted in a green circle. She has started standing up on the garden utility box outside the kitchen window and meowing at the top of her lungs… which we can hear while we are upstairs. So of course, I obliged and went out in the dark and fed her… at which point she greeted me with a cacophony of friendly meows. I’ve questioned the relationship we have given that she is still very feral and still impossible to get near… but clearly it seems I am her human and my role in life is to provide food when she wants it.
The problem with doing a long series that spans three weeks… is that there is a lot of shit that happens in the meantime that I never talked about. On Saturday, November 19th in a fit of frustration I deactivated my Twitter account, shortly after Elon Musk had reactivated the account of Donald Trump. I was immediately reminded by many people… that in 30 days it was highly likely that some doppelganger would set up shop with my handle, and we’ve seen that happen several times before in the past. So Sunday morning I slunk back onto Twitter, reactivated things, and then decided to borrow a tradition from Mastodon. When you migrate your instance it shows a desaturated version of your avatar and your banner and posts a link to where you have moved. So @Belghast and subsequently @Aggrochat now show that I have migrated to the Fediverse.
I have to admit I am still exceptionally happy with the Fediverse and though I have had to move during all of the burst in activity to Masto.ai, I am way more engaged than I was for the last several years of Twitter. It seemed for a while that everyone would be congregating in one form or another on the Fediverse as Twitter has continued to degrade over the last few weeks. I always knew that there would be a group of stragglers that avoided leaving Twitter until it absolutely no longer allowed anyone to log in. However, what I did not expect is for another social network to come in at the 11th hour and distract everyone so completely. Hive Social… not to be confused with Hive the project management software, or Hive the blockchain nonsense company, Hive the grocery store, Hive the furniture company, Hive the smart home automation company, or even Apache Hive.
Hive is mobile-only, which immediately puts it in a lower-tier category for me personally since I don’t really use my phone other than when I am laying in bed trying to fall asleep at night. I am primarily a desktop user, which is also why I generally hate vertical format videos but that is a rant for another day. The service itself seems aggressively “fine”, but what it offers is a near-perfect amalgam of Twitter and Instagram and asks absolutely nothing from the user. You download an app, click some buttons, and you are immediately in a very familiar interface talking to hopefully familiar people. Its downsides however are that the performance in the app is awful… like staggeringly awful. Then there is the problem that you are moving from one walled garden controlled by a central authority to a different walled garden controlled by an “even less prepared to handle this fame” central authority. Then there is the whole issue that a key member of the team is a Milkshake Duck. I poke my head in from time to time to see what my friends who are mostly on that platform are up to, but I am not giving it much attention until at a minimum a web client exists.
What has driven me up a wall though is that while we have left Twitter, the same Twitter-like behavior persists. To quote a friend of mine “You can take the people out of Twitter, but you can’t take the constant self-promotion out of the people, I guess.” What particularly is driving me up a wall is seeing the same posts recycled between Twitter, Mastodon, and Hive. This “awareness” started when I followed an internet comedian of a sort that I had not followed in years on Twitter. They are known for short quippy posts that are mildly humorous and I was fine to have that in my feed on the Fediverse. That was until I saw one scroll past that I thought sounded really freaking familiar. It turns out that they had just been recycling posts from like eight years ago from Twitter.
Then there are the folks who are talking about how both Hive and Mastodon are the one true social network and so much better than Twitter… but posting the same statement to both platforms with only the names of the networks swapped. The above screenshot really bugged me the most though, because you have this faux heartfelt message… that showed up on Sunday on Mastodon… and then showed up almost word for word from the same person on Hive yesterday. The identity has been blanked out because I am not trying to call out one specific person, but a behavioral pattern I am seeing from folks who were micro-influencers on Twitter, trying to pack up that same game in their traveling case and take it on the road to the next network. You are better than this… We are better than this. It is one thing to cross-syndicate a post or share the same image in multiple places, but it is another thing to dive deep into the parasocial bullshit by cross-posting something that seems like a genuine unique sentiment.
I think that is the part of Twitter that always bothered me the most… the insincerity. When I start a post and address it “Hey Friends” I am not trying to pull on your emotional heartstrings, I am genuinely addressing you as my friends. I’ve been on the internet for so many years and the majority of my long-term friends… came from somewhere online. I never know when a random occurrence will become my next friend that I stay in contact with for the next several decades. I’ve always tried to approach each interaction with the possibility that it could be legitimate and genuine… but Twitter had burned me hard on this. So many times I found out that someone I thought was legitimately my friend, was just posturing and posing as one. Going into the Fediverse and Mastodon, I hoped that I could be open again… and for the most part, I am trying really hard to be. However, seeing the constant influencer nonsense taking place there and gaining a foothold… is making me start to doubt that it will stay that way.
Anyways I am home on the fediverse for better or for worse. I hope yall are having an excellent week, and I didn’t mean for this post to take quite the sharp downer turn that it did. Much love and hopefully tomorrow will be a more chill post.
