Check out the book Redshirts by John Scalzi. It’s a meta-satire of Star Trek about what would happen if the redshirts started noticing that anyone who goes on a mission with the captain ends up dying. One of the funniest books I’ve read. As a bonus, the audiobook is narrated by Wil Wheaton.

That’s awesome. How much instruction do you have to give it to be close enough to what you remember?

It’s a frustrating growing pain but I’m glad he’s working on a fix now rather than waiting until the instance gets overwhelmed

I tried creating an account on lemmy.world at first and could never get it to load correctly. Try joining another instance - lemmy.world is probably overloaded.

Edit: use lemmyverse.net to look through the available instances, their rules, and their uptime stats.

There’s usually no need to join multiple servers. The only really reason would be if the communities you want to interact with are in instances that aren’t very well federated (ie connected to lots of other instances). Then you may want accounts on the more isolated instances to access that content and an account on a more mainstream instance to give you access to the rest of Lemmy’s content.

Managing multiple accounts can be tricky, but I’ve heard some of the apps are good at aggregating the content across multiple accounts. I only have one Lemmy account though so I don’t have firsthand experience.

Check out lemmyverse.net - it’s a great tool to browse the communities and instances out there

I got started with browsing the most popular communities (if you're on a browser, click Communities in the upper left, then pick All under List of communities) and picking the ones that seemed interesting. Then I started searching for ones that mirrored my subreddits and other interests. One thing to note is that Lemmy is growing so fast that you'll often find more than one community about the same topic, so don't be shy about subscribing to somewhat duplicative communities until one comes out on top.

There are still some subreddits that don't have an equivalent here yet, so I check back for those every few days to see if anyone has gotten around to them (I'm definitely not up for moderating myself)

As @Nonameuser678@aussie.zone posted, you can also use https://browse.feddit.de/ to quickly search for communities and see their subscriber, post and comment count to gauge how active they are.

Welcome!

Edit: I just learned about lemmyverse.net which is an even better website to browse both instances and communities. Check it out!

Is there a way to merge accounts so you can see everything in one place without switching? If not, managing multiple accounts is cumbersome.

There sure is! A few actually, but !aita@lemmy.world seems to be the only one with real activity.

If you're on a browser, you can search for communities with the search button in the top right. Make sure you set the Search dropdown to Communities and the Subscribed/Local/All option to All. The search can take a little time and it's not predictive, so you may need to search a few times to see everything. For instance, I searched for both aita and asshole to see all the AITA communities.

https://browse.feddit.de/ provides a more user-friendly experience with real-time searching and filters for the different instances in case you don't want to engage with one or it's defederated from your instance. Plus it shows you how many posts and comments each community has so you don't have to click on each one to see how active it is.

Welcome to Lemmy!

Good point, I completely forgot to call out all the people hosting and upgrading instances to help with the massive influx and keep the sites stable.

Anyone who’s interested in this should check out the book All Yesterdays, where artists have tried reimagining dinosaurs with actual muscle and fat instead of the shrink-wrapped look. They updated some classic dinosaur designs based on recent findings, such as how triceratops may have had spines/quills along its back like a porcupine.

To demonstrate how unrealistic the shrink-wrapping style is, for the second half of the book they applied that technique to known modern animals with some terrifying results, like these swans.

That would be great. It’ll take some pretty good UI/UX design to make a single experience that works well for both types of communities. Looking forward to seeing what developers come up with.