Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in !general@lemmy.world till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

You’re welcome to post about papers and discuss them over in !general@lemmy.world to try to get this going for more specific communities!

You might give the programming.dev instance a try for the first couple subjects, as they have an open !programming@programming.dev community that may work for them.

Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in !general@lemmy.world.

I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.

Brings to mind this NSFW ('cause light horror) short film “Circles”

You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

In strict technical terms, yeah it’s okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.

There’s still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they’re in an odd spot.

The first of these you’ll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.

PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.

The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.

All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.

Lemmy isn’t a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.

Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it’s arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.

Nevertheless, it’s possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn’t suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.

Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:

• Kbin, flagship site: Kbin Social
• Mbin. No flagship, check list of instances.
• PieFed, flagship site: PieFed Social
• Sublinks. No flagship, still in-development as drop-in replacement for Lemmy.
• Discuit. Not federated, but open source.
• Lobste.rs. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.
• Raddle. Not federated, built on open source Postmill.
• Tildes. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.

One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I’d recommend visiting:

!moviesandtv@lemm.ee
!movies@lemm.ee
!music@lemmy.world
!casualconversation@lemm.ee

Honestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.

i’ll tell ya how to undo this, but it’ll involve going over their heads, and you won’t believe this but then you’ll be…

this is too perfect

Commenting to indicate my shared interest in this (despite the other comments suggesting the unlikelihood of such an option emerging).

Nobody was tbh

How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.

So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.

Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.

OP mentioned TiddlyWiki, which I think is a good option if you’re wanting to keep everything together and in a pretty longlasting format, plus there’s a small but creative community that’s made all kinds of interesting plugins for it.

However, if you’re looking for something very small and similarly flexible, there’s also Feather Wiki. Outside of these two, another person already mentioned it but there’s Zim, which may feel a little more comfortable to use as it’s separate desktop software from your browser.

I’ve not made anything with Feather Wiki, but I’ve dabbled with TiddlyWiki and Zim and liked both for different reasons. TW for possibility of sharing/publishing in a nice looking format, and Zim for linking together different offline notes and files (it can also export to bare html which you may then make look nicer with some CSS).

Lastly there’s also Zettlr that I’ve only just started playing around with. I think it may work a little better than Zim in terms of handling offline note sorting and linking files, but I’m not sure yet.

Despite its name, Bookstack isn’t an ebook organizer or ebook organizing server software, it’s more in line with a wiki or personal knowledge organizer software.

I inadvertently found myself coming across software you might sorta like @Spiffyman@slrpnk.net in the form of Zettlr. It’s FOSS, uses Markdown formatting, and is able to export to a variety of different formats.

Downsides are that there’s currently no mobile app, nor plugin/extension support, so the base software is what you get. Nevertheless, it’s a very fully featured piece of software from what I can tell and has pretty good documentation to help learn your way around it. Bonus as well is that it’s cross-platform, so you can run it across different OSes on desktop.

Edit:
Also OP, if you’re really fond of TiddlyWiki but want more guidance on making it more structured, you might look through these notes. TiddlyWiki is really cool, however it certainly takes some getting used to with its style.

you ams the monsters

[…] the group’s agenda and politics were inconsistent with Georgia’s conservative values.

In other words, supporting open access to a broad range of varied information is against their conservative values. Not that that’s news to anyone following conservative behaviors, but it must be emphasized for those that don’t.

Alongside that, undercutting a source of funds may not be banning books, but it absolutely reduces the operational capacities of libraries that were benefiting from them, in effect removing a range of books the libraries might otherwise provide.

Besides it simply being different and other details others might bring up, it can also just be cheaper and simpler depending on your situations. No technical issues to sort through (“sorry my internet’s acting up/i think the servers are down”/etc.) and no need for hardware at all to simply communicate and do whatever in the same space.

Turkeys have weird silhouettes. One minute you think you’re looking at a map, the next some broccoli, and before you know it they’ve got you surrounded

did you know people born on leap years only emerge and exist on leap years?