I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.
I have seen game devs that are public with what company they work for also get death threats/hatred/etc whenever a game comes out that flops even if they didn't work on it specifically. Gamers can come off as a really political audience with a lot of grift money to be made on culture war stuff so it makes sense if you're an apolitical gamedev to stfu.
There aren't many social media communities with quality gamedev content, because professional (especially AAA) developers with decades of experience rarely participate, and you can only have so many beginner communities. The lack of participation exists for many reasons:
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Perhaps "interesting to read" does not correlate directly to "healthy discussion". It's a feature that Lobste.rs has low volume commentary, it leads to more authentic response less ad-hominem or passive-aggressive commentary like HN is constantly flooded with.
The stats page is just a clone from the site it's code is forked from, you can tell because they even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.
The problem with 'HN but for [x]' sites is that what they offer is just a subset of HN. Game dev posts might not be the most popular here, but they're still allowed and do get some traction from time to time - so there's little incentive to post somewhere that has even fewer eyes.
IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.
Exactly - you can only add so many inner matryoshka dolls before they're not big enough to sustain critical mass.
If HN is a subset of other sites (though arguably its approach to UX and moderation offer something different), a site targeting a subset of HN's users seems unlikely to get much traction.
The things this site used to offer was there might be an article about a security breach, a brand new highly anticipated feature in a major product, a historical article about a long forgotten but major technological achievement.
Then a key person from that story would chime in with their take about what the article got right or wrong, offer to answer questions. And that is assuming they didn't directly make the post.
Nobody actually wants to read self promotion blog spam, besides other people pretending to be engaged so they can do the same
I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?
+1 for tags. As HN has grown, the topics here have become so broad that it might be months before a particular topic you are interested in like gamedev makes it to the front page. It would be awesome to click a tag and only see submissions about that topic. Or better yet, unclick a tag and filter out submissions about that topic. I'm so sick of AI this and LLM that and DeepFoo and ChatBar, it would be so nice to just delete that noise in my own view of HN's front page.
I think we don't see the special, as I never see anything untoward on HN, and since I know the general population has some... Colorful people; the key here has to be the moderation team, and the front page mechanism (algo, manual, whatever it is)
Idk if dang was in charge back in the day, but I remember HN used to shut off sign-ups whenever Reddit went down (very frequently like 10 years ago) so they didn’t get a flood of users looking for a low-effort Reddit like experience. Those are the kinds of things I’d never think about but are also what has kept HN so great. Genuinely glad this bit of internet has been so well maintained over the years.
Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?
Yes, honestly i think this is the largest contribution to HNs successful place in its niche. Every other website turned from articles to images to infinite scroll politics and gifs. They all did that because it sells more ads. HN has never made a design change that prioritizes anything over articles. And even when it does conform to the greater trends of most people reading comments over articles (increasing bubblifiation of popular beliefs) the comments are much huge quality here because we're all the kind of people who like a site with articles, and thus more people actually read the articles, and the feedback does not include the internet ubiquitous "social credit score" seen on numerical stats around every comment on nearly every other website.
I mean that referring to "HN for X" is like (more than a decade ago) "Facebook for X".
I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.
Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.
Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well.
Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.
Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard.
I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.
the post clearly implies that opting for independent hosting instead of creating a subreddit (the admittedly easier route, for community building as well as technologically) for a niche forum indicates a "sense of grandeur"
You might be kind of young, so there was this time when "Facebook for health" and "amazon for X" were used as legitimate pitch items as a way to frame the potential of whatever CRUD app someone was selling as a billion dollar visionary idea. It was very tiring. The modern equivalent is something like a "DALL-E 0llamma MLA is all you need" post about a random arvix article about ML
What if such feeling is justified? Everything else equal, I'd rather have a community not belong to Reddit, and I'd be horrified if HN somehow "migrated" to being a sub, the difference between communities is enormous.
and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.
That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
I guess we've had different experiences on here then.
I've had really in-depth and fascinating conversations (or simply lurked the comments when I have nothing to contribute) on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others..
While the feed itself might be generalist, the people who choose to dig into specific topics on here are often experts (sometimes very notable ones) in their field, and it can lead to very enlightening and educational discussions.
> on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others
Exactly. Every day another topic. Great for keeping yourself informed and running into the occasional insider insight that will help you 2 years down the road.
Not enough for a domain you're really interested in, whichever that is.
My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said.
I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.
For example, SDL 3 was officially released last week, which I think is significant. It was posted on HN, but it didn't get enough votes to be visible to me.
This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.
For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
The communities centered around links and comments that I get the most value out of are those that are gently strict about the discourse that occurs on them. They are well curated by moderators. But importantly, still open to all to participate in.
That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?
I'm willing to bet invite-only is not a substitution for moderation (since some of the worst members of a site are often its most frequent posters), but a sort of reputation system to prevent bots from joining. I remember demonoid did the same thing back in the day
Currently building my own game engine for my games[1], but I'm facing the classic indie game marketing challenge. While platforms like CrazyGames, Poki, grab most of web players.
I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.
Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!
Oh man Celeste was FANTASTIC. I've been active in /r/gamedev for forever (because I used to teach high school kids how to make video games), so I was already interested but this seals the deal.
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.
In terms of "x for gamedev", what I would love to see is a fork of Brilliant that covers common topics from the basics up, using pseudocode only. I've always liked Cat-Like Coding's approach to tutorials, but I've never been able to "acquire" that knowledge (and an intuitive feel for it) in a permanent way like I have with Brilliant's method. I know that they have a CS module, but one specific to gamedev topics would be amazing.
Interesting take! I detest when a system says something like: 3 days ago instead of an exact date/time or the total hours since. If its months ago, then the date makes the best sense to me. Maybe I'm just data driven in some way and don't like it when people "hide" details?
The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)
I have a list of games i have been wanting to make for ages. I was a game dev in the 80s, but got into b2b DOS, Windows and then Web dev to make for more consistent money. I guess if I ever do, I would do it for myself and if others like it, fine, if not, fine.
This is absolutely fine. But people who post on Reddit or gamedev.net or any other forum ultimately are also looking for external validation. If they weren't they would not be posting. But hey let's be honest, who wouldn't want to get at least some pats on the pack or some positive feedback, right? But sadly it's a dead end for 99% of people posting on any channel.
Tangentially related to this, in the -80s there was the video game crash and a bunch of games were even buried in the ground.
It's incredible to think about that today we're already way past that and essentially the cost of any game is about 0.
Of course that's not quite true, the market is bimodal where you have the games that cost nothing (because user's would not pay for them) and then the triple A level games.
Unfortunately in the former group creation of the games still costs something so now any studio with paid workers has to rely on secondary avenues for revenue since the user's aren't willing to pay up front to pay the game.
I'm really not sure if this is a healthy market anymore.
Assuming this is your site OP, well done for getting it built and launched. I noticed other comments saying "why not lemmy", "why not filter on game dev topics on HN". I think the opposite. Forge your own path and who knows where it will take you.
Let me summarize some of the points brought up here so far (and add a few of my own):
1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)
2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)
3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.
4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.
Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!
I called it a clone because it's the same software with the same look and feel, the same features, and the same invite rules. It's an obvious clone of lobste.rs the website, only even more exclusively tailored to a niche audience.
I don't think there is something like that for music specifically, but there are still many traditional forums with interesting discussions. See for example these:
Ahhh, speaking of traditional forums, I personally like https://www.skyscrapercity.com/, it's still surprisingly active. It's also the only where I can get the most updated news about public transport/infrastructure in my country (Indonesia).
Also I just remembered that rateyourmusic apparently have their own forum too: https://rym.fm I've never taken a deep look at it, but it's surprisingly... active?
I'd love there to be a HN for high-impact medical articles. Or alternatively for someone to build a tagged layer on top of HN with clear 'biotech' and 'medical' tags.
And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.
Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to only federate with a select few strictly moderated instances (and abide by their rules yourself), or risk spam and illegal content getting stored on your server.
I'm bitter because I really want to love the fediverse. I fully support the principles behind it, but making an ActivityPub-based server is less like adding RSS to a site and more like running a WordPress site with a bunch of iffy plugins. The relative popularity of the fediverse shows that there's a market for non-corporate social media, but the protocol has fundamental issues that really limit it. Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment.
Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha software. People need "just" to bring friends and make sure that everyone there behave like decent human beings. I also pledge to give 20% of my profits to the developers.
In theory it's a win-win-win. In practice, people just prefer to stick with Instagram or going to Bluesky because that doesn't require anything from them.
I think that after "this meeting could've been an email", we should start thinking "this website could've been a Lemmy instance".
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
Precisely! Why not support the technologies that exist especially when it comes to helping drive critical mass of users to both? Making this a Lemmy instance would be mutually beneficial to both.
I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the mob. Yes, I blocked some instances, but the app delivery means the culture bleeds between them. It felt like worse twitter.
I feel like it's not just instances, but also the groups. I've carefully selected a bunch of well-moderated groups that bring me content I care about, and I interact regularly.
But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.
Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.
Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.
Yeah, the default view is absolute horrendous (to me) after I got a couple of customers who seem to love 196 stuff.
There has been some discussion to allow admins to make a selection of communities that should be visible/hidden for non-logged users, let's hope this lands soon.
Regarding the login bug: what version of Lemmy is your instance on? After I upgraded my instance to 0.19.8 this issue has mostly gone away.
I mostly agree with you (I'm staying on Lemmy despite the average user, not because of them), but this is not really relevant to the point here.
My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.
After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.
The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.
Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed.
I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.
But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.
I used less and less Lemmy since then.
This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.
The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
> The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting.
Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?
Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.
Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.
But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.
I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
Nice work!
The problem I find with the gamedev subreddit is it seems like it’s 90% beginners
And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs
This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.
I have seen game devs that are public with what company they work for also get death threats/hatred/etc whenever a game comes out that flops even if they didn't work on it specifically. Gamers can come off as a really political audience with a lot of grift money to be made on culture war stuff so it makes sense if you're an apolitical gamedev to stfu.
This is the problem you will find with pretty much any subreddit, they are always filled with beginners. Drives me a little crazy.
You might like https://www.redblobgames.com/
Yep, familiar with this one - one of the best out there!
I miss the TIGSource forums on its prime.
There aren't many social media communities with quality gamedev content, because professional (especially AAA) developers with decades of experience rarely participate, and you can only have so many beginner communities. The lack of participation exists for many reasons:
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
If I may: https://www.reddit.com/r/GodotCSharp/
It's a no memes, no marketing subreddit for C# Godot.
(I am the Mod)
A little off-topic, but have you found spam or fake content to be a problem in the last year or two?
no, but it's a very small (2k members). it's pretty much a "serious, no fun" sub so probably that's a good filter :D
When you've only got 3 comments on your whole front page, not sure invite-only is the best idea.
This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Perhaps "interesting to read" does not correlate directly to "healthy discussion". It's a feature that Lobste.rs has low volume commentary, it leads to more authentic response less ad-hominem or passive-aggressive commentary like HN is constantly flooded with.
Especially considering how long this site has been around at least according to the stat page (over a decade at this point).
https://gamedev.city/stats
The stats page is just a clone from the site it's code is forked from, you can tell because they even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.
https://lobste.rs/stats https://gamedev.city/stats
The problem with 'HN but for [x]' sites is that what they offer is just a subset of HN. Game dev posts might not be the most popular here, but they're still allowed and do get some traction from time to time - so there's little incentive to post somewhere that has even fewer eyes.
IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.
I used to think this, but after reading about engagement numbers elsewhere, Hacker News is actually very small when compared to other venues.
Depending on where you're reading, it's Hacker News that's a subset of just about anything else.
Exactly - you can only add so many inner matryoshka dolls before they're not big enough to sustain critical mass.
If HN is a subset of other sites (though arguably its approach to UX and moderation offer something different), a site targeting a subset of HN's users seems unlikely to get much traction.
Who cares about engagement numbers?
The things this site used to offer was there might be an article about a security breach, a brand new highly anticipated feature in a major product, a historical article about a long forgotten but major technological achievement.
Then a key person from that story would chime in with their take about what the article got right or wrong, offer to answer questions. And that is assuming they didn't directly make the post.
Nobody actually wants to read self promotion blog spam, besides other people pretending to be engaged so they can do the same
I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
Isn't game development already discussed here?
I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...
The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
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Gamedev is discussed here but honestly not very often if you enjoy it more then the more popular HN topics.
Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?
For better or worse at least it's not "uber for X" posts of a half decade ago
The thing is HN doesn't even have a tag system so you can't "see gamedev posts only".
So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.
The 'Unreal community' has enough relevant content that it'd take a lifetime to go through it all. I'm sure the same is true of Unity.
Maybe not the more general stuff you might be after, but those forums+ deserve a mention.
+1 for tags. As HN has grown, the topics here have become so broad that it might be months before a particular topic you are interested in like gamedev makes it to the front page. It would be awesome to click a tag and only see submissions about that topic. Or better yet, unclick a tag and filter out submissions about that topic. I'm so sick of AI this and LLM that and DeepFoo and ChatBar, it would be so nice to just delete that noise in my own view of HN's front page.
Theres some sort of something quite special about HN and I suspect it's the lack of anything special.
I think we don't see the special, as I never see anything untoward on HN, and since I know the general population has some... Colorful people; the key here has to be the moderation team, and the front page mechanism (algo, manual, whatever it is)
For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".
Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.
Also I thank that moderating a popular forum is dang hard.
Idk if dang was in charge back in the day, but I remember HN used to shut off sign-ups whenever Reddit went down (very frequently like 10 years ago) so they didn’t get a flood of users looking for a low-effort Reddit like experience. Those are the kinds of things I’d never think about but are also what has kept HN so great. Genuinely glad this bit of internet has been so well maintained over the years.
So the secret to "hn for X" is "dang for X"
I see what you did there, well played! :o)
Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?
> might have more to do with your vantage point
It has everything to do with the simple fact that HN was launched in '07, when Reddit wasn't that mainstream.
And it hasn't really changed since '07 (and I say this in a very positive way).
Yes, honestly i think this is the largest contribution to HNs successful place in its niche. Every other website turned from articles to images to infinite scroll politics and gifs. They all did that because it sells more ads. HN has never made a design change that prioritizes anything over articles. And even when it does conform to the greater trends of most people reading comments over articles (increasing bubblifiation of popular beliefs) the comments are much huge quality here because we're all the kind of people who like a site with articles, and thus more people actually read the articles, and the feedback does not include the internet ubiquitous "social credit score" seen on numerical stats around every comment on nearly every other website.
I mean that referring to "HN for X" is like (more than a decade ago) "Facebook for X".
I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.
Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.
> For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".
it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN
It’s not about self hosting, it’s about how community building is hard.
Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well.
Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.
Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard.
I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.
the post clearly implies that opting for independent hosting instead of creating a subreddit (the admittedly easier route, for community building as well as technologically) for a niche forum indicates a "sense of grandeur"
That's not how I read it at all.. It's the "HN for..." part that is the sense of grandeur.. Not the idea of self-hosting vs. using Reddit or Discord.
HN has been around for 15 years, it has earned its place as a quality community through time and much effort (i.e. moderation).
So to call yourself "HN for..." as a brand new thing is like opening up a brand new coffee shop in your town and saying "we're the next Starbucks"...
You might be kind of young, so there was this time when "Facebook for health" and "amazon for X" were used as legitimate pitch items as a way to frame the potential of whatever CRUD app someone was selling as a billion dollar visionary idea. It was very tiring. The modern equivalent is something like a "DALL-E 0llamma MLA is all you need" post about a random arvix article about ML
What if such feeling is justified? Everything else equal, I'd rather have a community not belong to Reddit, and I'd be horrified if HN somehow "migrated" to being a sub, the difference between communities is enormous.
and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.
> Isn't game development already discussed here?
I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.
Any dev based forum needs full markdown support where you can type ```javascript.
//js code here.
```
And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.
That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
Neither am I. Doesn't mean HN works as a go to for game development information. Or for web development. Or for embedded development.
HN is more of a collection of high level interesting facts about everything techy.
I guess we've had different experiences on here then.
I've had really in-depth and fascinating conversations (or simply lurked the comments when I have nothing to contribute) on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others..
While the feed itself might be generalist, the people who choose to dig into specific topics on here are often experts (sometimes very notable ones) in their field, and it can lead to very enlightening and educational discussions.
> on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others
Exactly. Every day another topic. Great for keeping yourself informed and running into the occasional insider insight that will help you 2 years down the road.
Not enough for a domain you're really interested in, whichever that is.
Invite system tends to do wonder for the quality of discussion, tho.
Only if you actually get enough people in the door..
Plus sometimes invite systems mean you just get the "usual suspects", friends-of-friends, etc...
It definitely has value in keeping out the spammers and trolls though, I agree there.
I suppose it depends on how you want to handle moderation in the long run.
My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
Some of these HN for X do manage to break free. I like jgc's Two Stop Bits retro "HN", which is a very small community, but active:
https://twostopbits.com/news
It looks like 70% of the posts there are from bmonkey325 and most threads have no replies. I wouldn't call it active.
> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
You're kind of describing an RSS reader, or del.icio.us...
Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said. I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.
I had an idea last week for a dutch version of HN, only to realize that dutch people already use HN
Pretty much the only country in the world where every single person speaks perfect English.
>Isn't game development already discussed here?
ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.
also very useful side project
For example, SDL 3 was officially released last week, which I think is significant. It was posted on HN, but it didn't get enough votes to be visible to me.
I requested an invite. Would love to join this, I've been a professional gamedev for about half of my career.
My confirmation link was a link to Tentacle Typer's steam page.
This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)
Are you asking about design, running a studio, development practices besides code (art, writing, animation etc), market research?
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.
For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.
It would certainly help being able hide tags easily, as a guest. They add way too much visual noise without adding much in terms of the ux.
The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.
I immediately backed out, because it literally gave me a headache within about 5 seconds.
> hacker news aced it with the clean look
It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.
Tables are great provided you’re never going to do much styling with them … and maybe that’s what makes them great.
You can do this with divs/lists and bit of css as well.
Yup, I think the background texture needs to go away and the font color of the posts needs to change.
I just use browser extensions to get a dark theme.
Example: https://darkreader.org/
Personally I love it. I'm tired of websites with no character to them
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
The invite only is very offputting.
So it is more lobste.rs than Hacker News
It's running on lobste.rs code as far as I've seen.
The communities centered around links and comments that I get the most value out of are those that are gently strict about the discourse that occurs on them. They are well curated by moderators. But importantly, still open to all to participate in.
That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?
Maybe by definition they are harder to point to.
I'm willing to bet invite-only is not a substitution for moderation (since some of the worst members of a site are often its most frequent posters), but a sort of reputation system to prevent bots from joining. I remember demonoid did the same thing back in the day
https://lobste.rs/ is invite only and HN level quality IMO
Got mass banned for stating that a misunderstood comment was not to be seen in its negative light.
No thanks.
Currently building my own game engine for my games[1], but I'm facing the classic indie game marketing challenge. While platforms like CrazyGames, Poki, grab most of web players.
I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.
Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!
[1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast/
[2] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/dailynews
Resurrect https://flipcode.com.
To clarify : I'm not the author/host of the site. Saint11 [0], who worked on the recent "Celeste" platformer, is.
[0]: https://saint11.art/
Oh man Celeste was FANTASTIC. I've been active in /r/gamedev for forever (because I used to teach high school kids how to make video games), so I was already interested but this seals the deal.
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Requested.
great idea to add tags. Colourful account icons clutters page, i'd rather prefer the hacker news style without these icons
Color theme sucks. Not enough contrast.
just straight up hard to read. great site though
+1 those colors sucks
Nice! Great idea, I'll be sure to check it out
I'd love if there's more "hacker News like" sites. You could probably use the format for many things, a hacker news for writing?
Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.
The "moderation log" is pretty cool. Nice seeing the transparency. And also, the workload.
In terms of "x for gamedev", what I would love to see is a fork of Brilliant that covers common topics from the basics up, using pseudocode only. I've always liked Cat-Like Coding's approach to tutorials, but I've never been able to "acquire" that knowledge (and an intuitive feel for it) in a permanent way like I have with Brilliant's method. I know that they have a CS module, but one specific to gamedev topics would be amazing.
This is a bit off topic but I noticed that you've included a moderation log at the bottom. I don't think I've seen that before. I really like it!
I was just looking for exactly this!
HN is too VC focused for a lot of gamedev stuff to break through
Going to lurk here as well. Not a game dev, but a fun industry to follow on the side.
maybe a petty nitpick
but why do I see "41 hours ago" on one of the posts? it feels unintuitive to measure a time longer than a day in hours
Interesting take! I detest when a system says something like: 3 days ago instead of an exact date/time or the total hours since. If its months ago, then the date makes the best sense to me. Maybe I'm just data driven in some way and don't like it when people "hide" details?
Looks like another dead forum for gamedev.
The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)
I have a list of games i have been wanting to make for ages. I was a game dev in the 80s, but got into b2b DOS, Windows and then Web dev to make for more consistent money. I guess if I ever do, I would do it for myself and if others like it, fine, if not, fine.
This is absolutely fine. But people who post on Reddit or gamedev.net or any other forum ultimately are also looking for external validation. If they weren't they would not be posting. But hey let's be honest, who wouldn't want to get at least some pats on the pack or some positive feedback, right? But sadly it's a dead end for 99% of people posting on any channel.
Tangentially related to this, in the -80s there was the video game crash and a bunch of games were even buried in the ground.
It's incredible to think about that today we're already way past that and essentially the cost of any game is about 0. Of course that's not quite true, the market is bimodal where you have the games that cost nothing (because user's would not pay for them) and then the triple A level games.
Unfortunately in the former group creation of the games still costs something so now any studio with paid workers has to rely on secondary avenues for revenue since the user's aren't willing to pay up front to pay the game.
I'm really not sure if this is a healthy market anymore.
Assuming this is your site OP, well done for getting it built and launched. I noticed other comments saying "why not lemmy", "why not filter on game dev topics on HN". I think the opposite. Forge your own path and who knows where it will take you.
It's not, it's made by saint11 [0] who worked on Celeste.
[0] : https://saint11.art/
Not very clear to me how to get an invite. Do I ask for one here?
Cool, i like the colour scheme. It's kinder to my eyes.
Nice! I’ll bookmark this for sure
Let me summarize some of the points brought up here so far (and add a few of my own):
1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)
2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)
3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.
4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.
Game dev communities are great places in the internet. Thanks for creating this!
Godot game engine has blown me away lately, such a small footprint at about 100MB, loads very quickly, and can render high quality 3D
Does it have user submissions? I don't see a 'submit' while logged out and not making an account on the first date...
You actually can't make an account, since it's invite-only...
Oh, I suppose it makes sense if you're just starting to work with a group of manually vetted people.
In the long run, that's not HN though.
Yeah, I don't know. I applied for an invite, we'll see if it goes through.
Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!
If you go through the sign-up, it says it will post your application in public for anyone to approve shrugs
So who is this Hacker News for?
Would love to know more about the tech stack and the idea behind the site. How it started, and why...
Looking at the source/mod log/etc. it very much looks like it's using lobsters - https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
The theme reminds me more of Lobsters [1]. Is this site invite-based as well?
[1] https://lobste.rs
I was curious too, so I looked at the about page, and it says it is using a modified version of the lobsters code, so that makes sense!
Yes it's invite-based, and yes it actually is lobsters, a fork of it.
lobste.rs clone, invite-only. I'm not gonna beg for the privilege of providing value to an elitist community.
Is it a clone when the code is open-source and the maintainers publicly invite others to use it?
> You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license
From here: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters#:~:text=You%20are%20fre...
I called it a clone because it's the same software with the same look and feel, the same features, and the same invite rules. It's an obvious clone of lobste.rs the website, only even more exclusively tailored to a niche audience.
They actually even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.
https://lobste.rs/stats https://gamedev.city/stats
idk who you are but this comment made me wanna buy you a beer lol
Anyone knows any other similar sites? Personally I'm looking for "HN but for music".
The only other website I know is https://lobste.rs, and this website looks like it uses Lobsters' software
I don't think there is something like that for music specifically, but there are still many traditional forums with interesting discussions. See for example these:
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
https://www.progarchives.com/forum/default.asp
https://forum.metal-archives.com/
Ahhh, speaking of traditional forums, I personally like https://www.skyscrapercity.com/, it's still surprisingly active. It's also the only where I can get the most updated news about public transport/infrastructure in my country (Indonesia).
Also I just remembered that rateyourmusic apparently have their own forum too: https://rym.fm I've never taken a deep look at it, but it's surprisingly... active?
I'd love there to be a HN for high-impact medical articles. Or alternatively for someone to build a tagged layer on top of HN with clear 'biotech' and 'medical' tags.
https://twostopbits.com is a "Hn for retro computer games".
I also think it’s lobste.rs. The about section also mentions an invite-only user tree.
Is there a RSS feed? Why not make this a community in Lemmy?
not everything needs to be federated
It doesn't need to, but a social site should.
And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.
Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to only federate with a select few strictly moderated instances (and abide by their rules yourself), or risk spam and illegal content getting stored on your server.
I'm bitter because I really want to love the fediverse. I fully support the principles behind it, but making an ActivityPub-based server is less like adding RSS to a site and more like running a WordPress site with a bunch of iffy plugins. The relative popularity of the fediverse shows that there's a market for non-corporate social media, but the protocol has fundamental issues that really limit it. Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment.
Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha software. People need "just" to bring friends and make sure that everyone there behave like decent human beings. I also pledge to give 20% of my profits to the developers.
In theory it's a win-win-win. In practice, people just prefer to stick with Instagram or going to Bluesky because that doesn't require anything from them.
Nice.
But is it enough Web 0.9? :)
I love the HN / old reddit style
HN for economics or geopolitics could be interesting.
Waiting on approval under gnat.
"A glorified subreddit for HN readers..."
At some point, I wonder if `dang` would support this? It seems like a good idea. For more topic-specific higher volume news items.
1. Why aren't websites like this posted under Show HN? This is a promotional post, right?
2. How is this different/better than something like https://gamedev.stackexchange.com? More discussion-based vs Q&A?
It's not Show HN / Tell HN because I didn't make the site. But I like it and wanted to share.
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The only thing that gets me is that there is a loooooooot of border.
I think that after "this meeting could've been an email", we should start thinking "this website could've been a Lemmy instance".
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
Precisely! Why not support the technologies that exist especially when it comes to helping drive critical mass of users to both? Making this a Lemmy instance would be mutually beneficial to both.
I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the mob. Yes, I blocked some instances, but the app delivery means the culture bleeds between them. It felt like worse twitter.
I feel like it's not just instances, but also the groups. I've carefully selected a bunch of well-moderated groups that bring me content I care about, and I interact regularly.
But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.
Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.
Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.
Yeah, the default view is absolute horrendous (to me) after I got a couple of customers who seem to love 196 stuff.
There has been some discussion to allow admins to make a selection of communities that should be visible/hidden for non-logged users, let's hope this lands soon.
Regarding the login bug: what version of Lemmy is your instance on? After I upgraded my instance to 0.19.8 this issue has mostly gone away.
At the bottom it says: UI: 0.19.3 BE: 0.19.3-7-g527ab90b7
So I guess I just have to wait for them to update. Thanks for that!
I mostly agree with you (I'm staying on Lemmy despite the average user, not because of them), but this is not really relevant to the point here.
My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.
After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.
The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.
Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed.
I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.
But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.
I used less and less Lemmy since then.
This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.
The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
[1]: https://join.piefed.social
[2]: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
[3]: https://kevquirk.com/blog/linux-elitism-again
> The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting.
Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?
Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.
Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.
But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.