Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

If you haven’t already, definitely give 4 a try. The gameplay isn’t as polished, but you can see where everything you loved about 5 came from. And the story/characters are arguably even better than 5.

Persona 3-5 and Doom 2016 win by virtue of being the only ones I listen to regularly outside of playing the games. Doom is probably at the top, the album version is just incredible.

Honorable mentions go to the entire Zelda and Mario catalog, especially LttP and Super Mario World. They’re the nostalgic sounds of my childhood and stuck in my head often, I just don’t go out of my way to listen to them.

The only reason would be playing games online, old firmware gets locked out a couple weeks after an update releases.

But there’s also no real reason not to if you’re already running CFW. As long as Luma is reasonably up-to-date, a system update can’t break anything.

Rockstar has been moving that way in general for years. They get so focused on the immersive and sim stuff, they forget that they made their name on over-the-top chaotic fun. Everything from GTA4 onward suffers for it, other than RDR1 that struck a decent balance between the approaches.

Not only is it 12 years later, but when the game does finally come out it’s going to be the usual Bethesda bugfest. And I’m sure that’ll be left to modders to patch, as is tradition.

But because it’s Bethesda, most people will eat it up.

Especially true when the name of the instance in question is exactly what people are going to be punching into a search. They got in on the ground floor, they’ll be just fine.

It’s a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we’re looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for the primary.

I think the other way around is more likely. Their users having normal access in and out, but outsiders having limited access to Meta content. Going for the “exclusive club” vibe and making the users feel “special” will keep most of them in the garden.

While true, this only affects people who are hosting and running their own instance. And if they’re doing that, it isn’t that big of a deal.

Users that might struggle with the concepts are probably joining larger instances that are already federated, so the problem is solved as soon as they find the “All” button.

That game took one of my most hated mechanics (binary moral choices), came up with a concept for it I could have actually loved (the personas arguing), then botched the execution so badly that it felt even worse than a normal morality system. Impressive is certainly the word for Gollum, just not in the way the devs hoped.

They hit r/LemmyMigration and it’s creator once already, right before they announced the Spez AMA. They were quietly unbanned after a while with claims of it being a “mistake”.

I have a feeling they’ll try a much more thorough purge soon, despite all evidence showing how disastrously that would backfire.

A lot of current users are young enough that they don’t have any experience with those things, centralized services are all they’ve ever really known. The simplicity and convenience can be a huge draw for a lot of people.

These things sort themselves out organically with some time, but it looks and feels messy until then.

It very well could in the future. But the federated model slows it down compared to Reddit et al. where there’s centralized control, at worst a single instance will develop a contained hivemind. If that happens to yours, you can just hop to a new one. If someone is really concerned, they can just spin up their own brand new instance, or fork the code and create something themselves.

In the longer-term, we’re more likely to see the opposite problem. The in-depth communities are going to be niche by definition, and interested users will be fragmented across similar communities on different instances. 100 different groups of 10, instead of a single group of 1000.

But those “groups of 10” are much more pleasant than Reddit has been for years. That could change in the future, but for now there’s passion and enthusiasm wherever you look.

Apps are in an early state, but they exist. I can only speak to the Android side of things, but we have Jerboa and it works pretty well so far. And iOS has Mlem, which sounds like it’s in a similar situation.

It used to be MacOS, but I jumped ship as soon as iOS stuff started creeping in years ago. Because I had already jumped ship from iPhones for the exact same stuff. Arch is my *nix of choice these days, or Linux Mint if I’m recommending it to someone else who doesn’t want to learn Arch.

But with that said, my daily driver is a Windows machine these days. I’m getting lazy as I get older, so (relatively) effortless compatibility is king.

It doesn’t help that there was a landfill fire nearby right when the wildfire smoke was blowing in. Or that VA was trying to keep it quiet so everyone would just blame the Canada situation for the air being so bad.

It’s a nice lighthearted nod to the exodus, and also a nod to the subforums that came before Reddit. Communities may be the “official” name and I try to use it when talking to others, but they’ll always be sublemmys in my head.

Agreed. And when you do want the old intensity back, you can try a challenge run or fire up a randomizer for some chaos.