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JohnnyEnzyme

@ JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee

Posts

21
Comments

336
Joined

3 yr. ago

11mo ago

European Graphic Novels+ is moving to PieFed.Social (link & info in post)
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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 11mo ago
the upsides outweigh the historical data IMO.
Err... may I ask, based on what?
Personally, I put in hundreds of hours in to hundreds of mini-articles in the body of those ~400 posts I created across ~two years. For me, it would have to be an absolutely stellar set of features and security for me to go to some other instance which didn't have the means to migrate anything over. Like, what would be the point, mate..?

11mo ago

European Graphic Novels+ is moving to PieFed.Social (link & info in post)

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 11mo ago

Oh, right... instead of an absolute URL-style link.Good point, thank you!

11mo ago

European Graphic Novels+ is moving to PieFed.Social (link & info in post)

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 11mo ago

Thanks, Abby Normal!Btw, if you happen to know of any communities which might be interested in us, please give a holler...

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Yup, good point.

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Yeah, fair point!

Still, as has been commented in this thread, Lemm.ee indeed called for admins at some point in order to help out, but evidently got an underwhelming response. Perhaps part of that due to the fact that Sunaurus & Ella stating right up front that it was a thankless type of job.

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

¡Hola, compa!Yes I'm bummed, but we'll see what happens. Blaze has offered some help, and linked some kind of 'PieFed migration project,' above.

At this moment I'd say that even if a migration *is* possible, there's a very strong chance that EGN+ will need a new mod(s) to run the place. Aside from that, and if my health picks up, I'd be happy to keep contributing content, and maybe help out here and there.

I'll probably be posting that message to the community soon, but am mentioning it to you first, and for anyone else reading. =)

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Well, yeah. In .ee's case, one might surmise that Sunaurus was a whiz at backend-stuff, but maybe didn't have enough experience as lead admin in the specific capacity of dealing with multitudes of 'people fires.' (not that he wasn't absolutely wonderful and professional in everything he handled IMO) But, a lead admin would ideally be a manager dealing with direct-reports, not the guy who had to do it mostly alone for a long time, as I think he did.

What the community contributed (in the positive sense) to Lemm.ee was more than enough AFAIK. What was critically needed, rather, was a robust admin crew, be it fully volunteer and/or partly paid by donation. Maybe various tasks could have been rotated too, such as: "I'll handle the reports this week, Ilona will handle requests, Tomaso will handle documents, and Rafo will handle mod interactions, then we'll switch roles next week." Or something like that... Anything that worked, really.

Indeed, it would be really interesting to see how other big instances are handling all this, specifically the bad actors that all sites must deal with, and which ultimately seemed to bring down Lemm.ee.

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

“Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.

And that's fine. At a certain point I understood that what I was running was essentially a 'blog+,' and didn't have a problem with that, evidenced by my willingness to keep posting and composing content on a regular basis, seemingly much like yourself.

FWIW, and not unlike as with Legos-- European Comics are indeed a major industry and consumed around the world, altho not so much in the States and Japan. So, "niche" in the FV-sense, but by no means the real-world sense. This gave me a certain amount of motivation & hope to keep on truckin,' no matter what...

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Unfortunately, that's not what I'm talking about, either.

What I'm talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing... how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn't going to last indefinitely.

As a personal example of a 'motivated user,' I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I've populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.

For the most part it's been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it's still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it's been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn't necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.

At one time I thought community spirit (for what that's worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I'm not pointing fingers; I'm observing.

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Thanks for the offer and kind words! I've tagged you in the comment above...

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

@https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto

Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.

Yes, I understand it's already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.

As part of that, backing up the community's many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.

Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.

Anyway, that's for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I'm going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that's good for starters!

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Blaming the community for that is not fair.

I'm not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.

What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn't happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it's a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You'd have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess...

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard,

I'd say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there's a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It's certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.

12mo ago

lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

It really wasn't, sadly.

The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that's typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.

From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn't happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.

A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they've been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.

Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I'm very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.

So, yeah. :/

12mo ago

Good Ol' Archies

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Both drawn with almost the exact same figure (and face), of course.

I'm not really complaining, but I find this pretty common across comics, which is somehow kind of a let-down.

12mo ago

How can I stretch a 100 year old cowboy hat to fit my fat head?

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

What's the worst that could happen, do you think?

I've actually widened a hat much like this one by heavily wetting it, fitting it on a larger, head-shaped object, then letting it dry. Even permanently turned up one of the side-brims to create a "slouch hat" / "digger hat" look.

Worked great and no complaints, but I'm also curious what might have gone wrong...

12mo ago

Homemade Pizza

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

I like how you didn't go nuts with a thick crust, which is an ultra-common pizza-making mistake. That said, pro-tip: whether you use a pizza-steel or pizza ceramic, it's best to heat up either, as well the oven, to the highest possible amount, before actually placing the pizza on there and baking it as fast as possible.

Now, why? Well, it's because you want to move as much heat as quickly as possible to the dish, without actually burning the pizza across the shortest amount of time possible. What this accomplishes is to preserve the freshness of the ingredients, whilst also accomplishing the yeast-rising and bread-making... in fact getting the bread (crust) as perfectly, very-lightly scorched as possible.

You can see multiple examples of this across various pizza-making blogs...

12mo ago

How many can recall these two characters ?

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JohnnyEnzyme @lemm.ee 12mo ago

I hear ya! But we don't seem to have many fans of old-timey comics on this sub. :S