FYI, the stop killing games creators knew this would happen from a leaked article months ago, and instead shifted to work with EU Parliament, where they have majority support.

The EU commission just outed themselves as corrupt corporate cronies for nothing, as Stop Killing Games continues.

I like that they opted for Sailfish instead of Android (despite having my own qualms about Sailfish), but $500 for what is likely just a customized OEM phone is excessive. This really needs to be $200 at most, IMO.

There's nothing on their site that indicates it's not being produced in China. Their Commodore 64 Ultimate is produced in China, so I assume the phone is as well.

Even on reddit, it's known that 90% of users were lurkers, and only 10% ever commented or posted, it just didn't seem like that since there were am order of magnitude more users. But even then, some communities were propped up by just a handful of consistent posters.

The 10% figure is much more noticeable here since we only have 50k monthly users here on Lemmy/piefed.

We create a pinned community discussion thread each month, and invite our users to participate in the comments with any ideas, happenings in their lives, introductions, etc. We consider it, and call it, the instance's town square.

The moderator of our writing community also creates a monthly discussion inviting people to discuss the projects they've been working on.

I wouldn't be opposed to more of our moderators creating monthly or weekly threads in their communities, it's a good suggestion.

Just timeouts, slrpnk isn’t alone many lemmy instances have issues with loads. While writing the following list I had to wait about 5 seconds for a page load and often refresh or wait a long time for images to load. Users won’t do this.

I'm not experiencing that, personally. When I visit slrpnk it loads pretty much instantly, and I don't have to wait for images to load at all, they appear as I scroll. I haven't experienced any timeouts. You are currently the only person who has reported any sort of issue along those lines, and without more information it will be difficult to diagnose.

Is this occurring from visiting the page on a desktop browser? I have had issues with comments or images not displaying without a refresh when using the Summit app, but regular browsers and every other app I've tried has worked as expected.

There was a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause a browser to cache potentially gigabytes of data, causing the site to slow to a crawl. Does performance improve if you delete all data/cookies associated with slrpnk from your browser?

Many of these posts are hours or days old, niche,

The default sort is Active, those old posts are still getting comments, otherwise they wouldn't show up as active. If sorting by New, only the very last post on the front page is over 24h old. However, much of the appeal of reddit was the comments, so I don't think switching to New being the default would be ideal, since newer posts tend to have less comments.

and all the news has probably already been seen by a potential new user.

Can't say I agree with that assessment. Many people are not chronically online or already have good news sources for the topics posted about on slrpnk.

If you feel that the type of content posted on slrpnk isn't appealing, then there's not much I can say against that, as that is your subjective feeling. However, I think your own bias against the content posted there, such as news, may be leading you to conclude that it won't appeal to anyone else.

Even during its best days, Reddit was still ultimately a link aggregator with a forum attached below with most of it being news, and some smaller communities having more of a focus on original content, just as slrpnk does.

Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.

I obviously visit Slrpnk very often each day, and I do not have that problem despite being halfway around the globe from where the server is located, and none of our users have reported issues accessing the site. If you cannot access slrpnk, I do not believe the issue is on our end. Do you get any sort of error when you can't access it?

I am not trying to be defensive, but I am going to push back slightly on your framing of our instance if it contains misleading or incorrect information of our server that could unintentionally harm our reputation.

One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original.

I also see a post from our zine, self-hosting, vegan, BIFL, Green energy, and Nolawns communities, as well as a fantastic post with imaginative original content in our Solarpunk Art community.

Ah, I see.

Slrpnk went down only twice for an extended period in the 4 years its been up, each time only for about a week before it was fixed and back online. Both times were due to unforeseen hardware issues (since it's self-hosted and running on solar power, in-line with our ideals). Without trying to offend, I think you may have an exaggerated view of how unreliable our server has been. Our uptime over 4 years is 98.91%.

We also didn't see any lengthy drop of our active monthly users. Once they discovered we were back up, our numbers returned to normal, and we've continued to see steady growth, with a consistent active monthly userbase, per our fediverse observer stats:

To your second point, I believe it is relatively easy for a user to block those more active communities if they dislike them.

Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking "power users" (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.

Could you elaborate what you mean? I've been a slrpnk admin for near 3 years, and I haven't seen any power user drama addicts on the instance. I'm also not sure what you mean by blown up (too popular? We're still a smallish instance with 380 monthly users).

Personally I think we still have quite a lot of interesting posts and discussions in our communities.

Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn't actually do the thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.

Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.

Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.