kindly use /s next time please^^;

According to this article by Rock Paper Shotgun, they have connections to known fundamentalist and conservative groups.

Collective Shout is run by christian fundamentalists

Payment processors should not get to police what kind of legal transactions people use their services for. No matter how much you dislike the particular product. And especially since they have an effective monopoly. If we let them go through with this, it would open the gateway for them to enact the kind of control over our consumption that should be exclusive to elected officials.

game jams and indie games. there's no fee for publishing your game there, so it's the go-to place for indiedevs

we discussed this over in [email protected] back when it was initially announced! The fandom seems to be delighted about this feature, but I'm personally more concerned about the data privacy aspect of it all...the author is absolutely right to look at this whole thing with scepticism

I find it a little far-fetched to solely link the popularity of otome games to some kind of frustration with modern dating, though. Romance games (and romance in games, e.g. Baldur's Gate 3 or Mass Effect) offer a lot of fun in-and-of themselves.

I agree 100%, both look super ugly

As an alternative, there are tons of gamepad icons on freepik like this one that could be used as long as theres an attribution link in the community description.

Also here's a quick collage I screenshotted from steamdb, feel free to use it if there aren't any better ones by others:

What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.

We've had this exact conversation in this community two months ago already, in case you want to back read the comments from back then. Nothing significant has changed

To paraphrase my opinion from back then:

• Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
• customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you're in many starter packs)
• better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
• stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, "the nuclear block")
• many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with "HOA"-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods

I mean, I like Katawa Shoujo as well, but there's no need to be that condescending towards other games😅

The DS series was the peak handheld generation for me. I like that the console's design encouraged creative game mechanics, and it has some of my favourite games of all time. I have a DS Lite, a 3DS and a new 3DS, though I think the original DS line had the better game library compared to the 3DS. The camera and 3D effect were rather gimmicky and didn't add much value for me.

I think the game that best encapsulates what I love about the DS is The World Ends With You, a JRPG set in modern Tokyo that used both screens at once in its action combat system - to control two different characters. The character on the bottom screen would have you use touch gestures to trigger attacks, while you needed to do button combos to control the character on the top. It was insanely fun!

Other games I liked from the early DS era are Hotel Dusk, a detective game that is played in "vertical mode" so you hold the console like a book - and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, the original Japanese version of Elite Beat Angels, a rhythm game.

I also played all romance/otome games that were available in English for the DS, my favourite was Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side.

The DS figured out touch-based interactions way better than smartphones which are like the main touch-based "handheld" nowadays. That is because you could dedicate the entire touchscreen to gameplay input, since you still had the top screen to show relevant game information. Smartphones on the other hand need to utilize the entire screen both for input and displaying stuff, which just doesn't work as well imo.

My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:

• Easier onboarding overall since you don't have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
• despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter's
• Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it's easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
• Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing "starter packs" with lists of people to follow
• I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
• meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I'm following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I'm interested in
• quote-retweets don't exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
• the stackable moderation also helps a lot

Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon's side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo