Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.

If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it’s basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.

It’s an awesome field and nothing new.

Oh boy, that is one spicy topic. You could start here.

In short: The lead dev (who stepped down, but may be back again?) is involved in some controversy.

While I can fully understand why somebody wouldn’t trust the OS based on that, it’s still the most secure and private OS available today IMHO.

Some sort of user-controllable merging of community views would honestly alleviate most of this:

Adding something like user-specific topics, e.g. allowing the user to consolidate all posts from instanceA.communityA and instanceB.communityA and even instanceA.communityB into a custom community view shouldn’t be all that difficult to implement (he stated naively, having never looked at the codebase).

A great addition would also be to allow the merging of posts, e.g. show all comments of all threads under one post where the post URL matches and/or the title matches.

This isn’t exact, since multiple communities can discuss the same topic from completely opposite viewpoints, but at least allowing the user to consolidate stuff and control it would be huge.

I know that it’s a core design feature of Lemmy and the underlying federation, but it’s pretty annoying that multiple communities with the same name can exist on different instances while not necessarily following the same ruleset or even purpose.

The small user base gets even more fractured that way, a lot of posts get reposted to multiple instances as well.

So you either:

• subscribe to one or two communities and miss a lot of potentially interesting conversations
• subscribe to more communities and get flooded with reposts and potentially stuff you don’t want to see due to a different ruleset

Same here.

When starting out without having seen all that much of the game beforehand, I saw a great potential for just that expectation you and I shared. The game keeps you jumping from one task to another, managing your initially growing base(s) to produce new necessities, catch new/more pals, explore the map and …well, that’s basically it, so far.

The gameplay loop so far is pretty barebones and the countless bugs, especially regarding basebuilding and -managing, grew all the more frustrating as I was forced to realize that there simply is no goal or endgame besides catching all the pals, exploring the whole empty map and maybe spend countless hours optimizing it all by breeding the best attributes in your pals, i.e. holding F and waiting.

A lot of that is hopefully simply a symptom of it being early-access though, I expect to have a better time in a few months when the hype died down and the game has matured a bit more.