anaximander

Two games I really really to run right now.

One is Lancer. As much as I love fantasy games, the sci-fi setting looks like a nice change and battlemechs are cool. The character creation and levelling mechanics are interesting and I like the way you can reconfigure your setup so easily.

The other is the fantasy TTRPG I'm writing myself. Its current working title is Saga, and it's loosely inspired by ideas from D&D, Lancer, Fate, and my own experiments in game design. The aim is something more structured than Fate but more story-focused than D&D where non-combat challenges are given more emphasis and mechanical support.

I've had some ideas about a bot that comments on discussions with links to similar discussions on other instances. It'd use algorithms similar to search indexing, so I might look into a search provider app too, but I think a "related discussion finder" might be a good way to help similar groups find each other across the fediverse and come together. Might help offset some of the downsides of extreme decentralisation.

I think this highlights a very good point. It's totally ok for everything to gravitate to a central instance as long as that instance is run in a way that everyone is happy with. The key is the the moment something changes and users aren't happy, the decentralised nature of Lemmy gives those users an exit strategy - a way to replace the bad instance and carry on.

If a single Lemmy instance becomes the new Reddit and then pulls a move that angers the community the way Reddit has recently, users wouldn't be reduced to protests and hoping that management listen, they could just spin up new instances, mirror the content, and carry on like nothing happened.

Any of that could be done; there's some parts that are more challenging but there are certainly harder things that have been solved by open-source software. I know almost nothing about how Lemmy's innards are built though, so I couldn't hazard a guess as to how much effort any of it would take. Some of it could possibly be achieved through separate services that you could host alongside a Lemmy instance, or entirely on their own, while other parts would really work best as features within Lemmy's own codebase.

Simplest implementation is that an instance searches its own content while sending requests to federated instances and merging their results in with its own based on whatever method the instance admins want (whether it puts its own results at the top, or treats them as one set, or whatever). That could cause a lot of traffic and has a load of latency while your search spreads out hop by hop, to the instances that yours is federated with, to the ones they're federated with, etc. Plus you'd need a mechanism to stop instances from sending a search to an instance that's already got it, to avoid hammering instances that have multiple federation paths to yours. Not an easy problem.

You might be able to do some kind of index publication where an instance publishes the most notable posts for other instances to include in their indexes, so that when you search it could show you results from among hot posts elsewhere in the fediverse - not an exhaustive list, but a search within posts that are getting attention.

There's also other stuff I'd be tempted to experiment with, like using some kind of TF-IDF ranking to choose what counts as "most notable", rather than just activity or view count, so that posts that are particularly relevant to certain topics could be publicised. An instance could even choose to filter that, so for example an instance who chooses to focus on tech topics could publicise highly-relevant tech posts but filter out politics keywords even when a post gets high relevance scores, so that political discussion on that instance is less visible, even when searched for.

Haphazard scrawls on a notepad during the session, trying to not lose it in between the initiative orders and scribbled HP tracking from combats. After the session I try to collate it all into a OneNote where it's all organised by campaign and plot element and theme.

Lately I've been moving from OneNote to Obsidian. Obsidian's ability to link between files and then see the visual map of all the links is handy, and it can even detect mentions of a thing even if you didn't link it at the time, so if something becomes important enough that you later decide to create an actual page for it, it'll find all the places you previously mentioned it. Very useful.