Like many open source games, it has that distinctly ‘alpha’ feel to it right now, but I do enjoy NodeCore on occasion. It’s a zen minimalist block game with a unique diagetic crafting system. Instead of a traditional “recipe book” or “crafting grid”, you produce new materials through in-world transformations. For instance, to make glass, you have to surround sand with fire, and to control fire, you basically want to build a deliberately-shaped dirt or stone pit… the whole thing feels a little like minecraft and a little like a sand physics sim or cellular automata.

I think part of the problem is just that there are a lot more good games that people know about! Unfortunately one of the tradeoffs for all the riches of heaven is that it’s a lot harder to cover them all.

Basically, repeat the experiment under a wide range of conditions, and show that the conditions for success, if any, are far beyond the original claim. I always loved the ‘mythbusters’ approach: if one bible can’t stop a bullet, how about two bibles? ten? where is the cutoff between true and false?

where do you find good sources to follow, then?

Ultimately I think it’s sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python’s popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We’ll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that “buy their friends”, get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we’ll get a few “institutions” that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn’t wow me with Mastodon but I’m pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions… but personally I still think there’s room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

in a word, intersectionality. you’re getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you’re selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.