Aah, so I think Play Store is up to date but F-Droid isn’t, check again here: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.vger.voyager/

Unless this updates between me commenting & you checking (or browser cache is messing with me), it still shows v2.29.1 for F-Droid.

Checked the other day and it hasn’t gone up via F-Droid repo yet. I just downloaded the updated version from Github since it was bugging me.

I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.

Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.

You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:

https://lemmyverse.net/

Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation, & image upload limit is 500kb per image.

Source is instance sidebar, but if you’re using an app that’s gonna be found in a variety of places. In Voyager for example it’s under Communities>3 dot menu in the upper right>Instance sidebar.

Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).

Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.

It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.

I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.

Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

I don’t think so. The largest ask communities, according to their own descriptions, say they’re for more open-ended questions, albeit [email protected] seems to be more lax about it (and it seems like maybe [email protected] has kinda relaxed on it too).

There’s the newer [email protected] that doesn’t have the open-ended part to their description, so might be a good fit.

Tbh for all anyone knows they may be petting tardigrades regularly

It’s just a different Wafrn instance, which is why you couldn’t log into it.

As far as I’m aware it’s the first and only other Wafrn instance run by someone besides the creator of Wafrn. Hopefully in time there may be more.

Haven’t played it (probably in my wishlist), so I can’t help directly, but I can offer this: go ahead and ask the questions. If someone else around here has, then they can jump in to comment with advice and answers at any point in time later.

One of the perks of forum-style comms like this.

Yes. Alongside what others have mentioned, I think a couple factors are context oversight (in part from context collapse at times) and subsequent fumbling of code switching.

Many primarily comment in news or politics threads (see front pages with sort set to Active) or otherwise more serious communities, so I think it carries through in their other interactions elsewhere. It’s something of a bummer because generally neither party to fumbled interactions feels good about it.

Similar situation to Irelephant, first I’m reading about Loforo. Doing some brief research, it doesn’t look like Loforo’s integrated ActivityPub that much, nor does it seem to be open source so others could run their own instances.

In those respects Wafrn is the clear choice for a federated Tumblr-like, as it’s open source and integrates ActivityPub thoroughly. As a matter of fact, a little more digging and I found where someone has been helping test run another Wafrn instance in the form of “evil” Wafrn.

[…] I really don’t see gamers ever embracing AI.

They’ve spent years training to fight it, so that tracks.

Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.

It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.

Oh, at the time of writing I wasn’t sure if the thread title would display in their notifications with the mention, so I wrote that just in case.

Meant to comment this earlier. On your last point so far as I’m aware there’s currently no way to create a link post (direct URL lemmy link as you say) from Mastodon/microblog to Lemmy. The reason your test post is linking back to the Mastodon instance is because of the image attachment, because you can create image posts between the two.

If you drop the image attachment, while it won’t look as nice, you can get the separate title, link, and body text without it looking too bad. Unfortunately it will lose the visual draw in the process, but that seems to be the workaround for the time being.

The main ones would be @[email protected] and @[email protected], which I just mentioned so should be no need to mention again I think.

Btw for their benefit, adding the context: post with feedback and questions on Lemmy-Mastodon interoperation.

Efforts like this always have me split. On one hand I appreciate them keeping old media going, on the other I wish their efforts would go towards an open source clone/variant instead of propping up a neglected property from a giant company.

Especially when said company could abruptly change with different management and start trying to shut down their activities.