I’m really excited to get time to check it out. Maybe this weekend.

Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you’re right that that’s a step in the right direction. What I’d really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.

So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you’d see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.

You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.

Good to know. I want to use webapps rather than native apps as much as possible anyway, so this is probably good.

On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn’t want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.

Apparently! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Gonna check it out!

Oh, fascinating! I’m going to have to take a look. Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement.

What I really want out of a federated Reddit-like service is link consolidation. I don’t want to see the same link posted on five different communities; I want those to be consolidated into one topic, with the OP text and comments from each threaded below it. It’d clean up the interface and make it work a lot more usefully.

In fact, this would make pretty much everything in the Fediverse better. Let me sort my timeline by URL or hashtag, so that I can see what is being said about a certain thing and not make the same observation or joke that a dozen others already have. Put that functionality into an RSS reader, so that I can see the discussion without leaving the article. Or, even better, merge the two into a single feed, tying threads together based on the URL that’s being shared.

Now that would be an “everything app” worth using.

EDIT: Apparently they’ve already made the first leap there! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Looking forward to trying it out.

This can be good: I don’t go out of my way to recommend mediocre things just because they’re the first good (or even just acceptable) version of a thing that I’ve encountered.

Perspective is a gift.

Interesting. I knew about “bear” but I did not know about “medved” as another minced-taboo. Thanks for that.

Sorry for being unclear–proto-Celtic calls wolves “wailos” for the same reason as they call gulls “weilanna,” because of the noise, yes. The coincidence is that the modern word “wolf” sounds like the proto-Celtic word “wailos.”

You have to go pretty far back (to proto-Celtic, it looks like) to find a linguistic ancestor for the word “gull” that doesn’t just mean “that specific bird.”

But in proto-Celtic, it looks like “weilanna” probably meant “wailer.” As in, “one who wails,” though we don’t know exactly what the suffix “-anna” means. A similar word in that language would’ve been “wailos,” which even though it sounds similar seems to have been unrelated to our modern term “wolf,” as it comes from a different proto-indo-european root.

Anyway, the word “gull” does refer to the sounds that it makes more than anything else. So in figuring out what a landgull, airgull, and firegull might be, we need to find something noisy. Or just something annoying, given the derisive connotation of “wail.”

Edit: This is, of course, assuming that we’re looking for different existing types of animals to be these creatures, rather than just (for instance) creating new, elemental forms of gulls; or “reskinning” seagulls with different elements; or inventing all-new animals to fill those roles.

Probably. “We’ve investigated! No issues here!”

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.

Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?

WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.

People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.

How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.

Yeah, good point.

Ooh, good point. Well, they’re both going to ship from the factory in nonworking condition, so that’ll be tough to tell.

Absolutely gonna be “made in America” in that the application of the cheap Chinese gold decal to the cheap Chinese handset will be done in America.