Heads up, everyone: approximately 24 hours ago, our episode discussion bot @shinobu@ani.social stopped posting new discussion threads. Please be aware of the outage and consider posting manual discussion threads in the meantime until the situation is resolved.

The root cause of the outage is due to lemmy.ml defederating from ani.social (source), which of course hosts @shinobu@ani.social. Because !anime@lemmy.ml is hosted on lemmy.ml, this defederation situation prevents our bot from posting anything new to the community.

At present moment, there has been no official statement as to why this action was taken. It is my belief, however, that the decision was made without due consideration and should be reversed. I humbly call upon @dessalines@lemmy.ml to please take a second look at the content of ani.social and their content policy because I believe that the high standard they uphold as server operators is self-evident.

Thank you everyone for your time and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Poll Link: https://strawpoll.ai/poll/vote/thKiWOAMaJfQ

Background

Hello! I am the maintainer of @shinobu@ani.social. Shinobu is the !anime@lemmy.ml community bot responsible for posting episode discussion threads whenever new anime episodes air (example).

The goal of the above survey is to begin the process of establishing a community consensus for how Shinobu should be updated in order to best fit the needs of our community. The content of the survey is based upon the comments and suggestions fielded from this recent discussion on the topic.

Please note that the survey is planned to run until October 16th @ 12:00PM EDT. My goal is to honor the results of the poll however they may turn out, granted that the aforementioned results are accepted as reasonable and legitimate by the community at large.

As always, thanks for being a member of the community and doing your part to make it special! ❤️

It is my great pleasure to announce in collaboration with @virtualras@lemmy.world & @N3DSdude@lemmy.ml that automatic episode discussion threads will now begin posting to the !anime@lemmy.ml community starting right now!

Q&A:

What are episode discussion threads?

Simply put, they're a place to discuss newly aired seasonal anime episodes. Here's an example.

Why do these need to be automated?

Automation will lower the barrier to entry for discussions and help to remind everyone when new content airs. More importantly: it's what you guys asked for! (exhibit A, exhibit B)

What technology does the bot use?

The bot uses the same code as the /r/anime subreddit known as Holo. We had to fork the bot to make it work with Lemmy, but we intend to merge our work back upstream so that we can share improvements and collaborate with them when it comes to things like code optimizations and show data.

You can follow our efforts in refining & upstreaming the Holo fork here. Please feel welcome to contribute your own improvements to the PR as well 😊 (see below known issues list for ideas)

Why fork Holo?

Two reasons:

• Building a good bot is time intensive. By forking a mature project, you guys get what you want faster and us developers don't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
• Every season, some poor soul has to perform the grueling task of manually cataloging each airing show. By using a shared codebase, we benefit from the dedicated work of /r/anime's data collection instead of having to do it ourselves.

Are there any known issues?

Yes:

• Links to episodes that aired prior to today will point to the wrong place. The bot is designed with the assumption that it can edit every post it links to -- since the actual threads prior to today were manually created by other people, it's impossible to incorporate those threads into the bot's database.
• Episode polls currently have an anti-brigading feature using Reddit authentication. That's obviously kind of a non-sensical thing to do here since 1) this isn't Reddit & 2) nobody's brigaded us yet. We plan to fix this soon!
• Anime subreddits currently show up in each thread's "Show information" list, but there's currently no such support for plugging the equivalent Lemmy communities. Eventually, we'll need to get that set up and upstream it, too. 😉

Who's the bot?

The episode discussion bot is named @shinobu@ani.social!

Why's the bot hosted on ani.social?

Let's break this into three parts:

• Why not lemmy.ml? Because new user registrations are closed for lemmy.ml 🤷
• Why not lemmy.world? Because lemmy.world is defederated by beehaw.org. In addition, smaller instances (like my own) sometimes temporarily defederate lemmy.world during heavy traffic. Obviously, we don't want visitors missing out on episode threads just because of federation drama or a recent traffic surge!
• Why ani.social specifically? Because they're on-topic, small enough to generally dodge defederation threats, and serious about their infrastructure.

Why "Shinobu"?

Before /r/anime's bot was running under /u/AutoLovepon, it ran on an account named Holo. Clearly the bot's creator was a fan of Spice & Wolf. I named the bot Shinobu because I'm a 🤮 bakemonogatari 🤮 fan. No further questions -- this interview is over. I will never apologize!

Why YSK: If you want to make Lemmy a more accessible place for all, you need to know how to add labels (aka: "alt text") to embedded images

As many of you are already aware, you can embed images in comments using the following markdown: ![](https://example.com/image.jpg).

That works, but the image will be left unlabeled which leaves screenreader users out of the conversation. This may seem like a theoretical problem, but it's not -- Lemmy already has an active blind community: https://rblind.com/

So, here's what you can do to add labels when embedding images:

![Earth viewed from the Moon](https://example.com/image.jpg)

That's it! Any text within the [] becomes "alt text", which is what screenreaders use for describing images. It's a small thing, but it makes a world of difference.

Remember: Reddit took something from many of us here. For some, it was a mobile app. For others, it was the ability to operate their own communities. Comment with solidarity; use alt-text.

Why YSK: If you're an American (or Liberian/Myanma), simply knowing that 1m~=3.28ft is... not that helpful. Understanding a unit requires lived experience, after all

Well, if you play Minecraft: good news! Blocks in Minecraft are exactly 1m^3^. If you can close your eyes and visualize a Minecraft grid, you're probably already surprisingly good at measuring things in meters.

Let's give it a shot:

• How tall is the average person? A little bit less than ~~2 blocks~~ 2 meters
• How wide is the average person? About ~~1/2 a block~~ 1/2 a meter
• What's the furthest a young person can fall before it starts getting painful? Just over ~~3 blocks~~ 3 meters
• How big is the average room? About ~~6x6 blocks~~ 6x6 meters

Some players might even be familiar with kilometers if they use waypoint mods, such as Xaero's Minimap. If a map marker says it's 1000 blocks away, that's 1km. How long does it take a healthy person to walk ~~1000 blocks~~ 1 kilometer? About 10 minutes!

First, some background: I first became aware of PC gaming in 2012 (15yrs after HL1, 7yrs after HL2). I played both games back-to-back and then later replayed both separately.

There's so much to be said about these two games, but I'll sum up my feelings in a few bullet points:

• HL1 is more thematically unified. It plays true to its Sci-Fi & Die Hard roots up to the point of campiness, but that fits rather well for a game whose protagonist is effectively a nerdy Doom Marine -- more a force-of-nature embodiment of survival than traditional hero.
• HL2, on the other hand, feels weighed-down by this legacy. It wants to tell a serious story about a charismatic freedom-fighter. That's an aesthetic which clashes terribly with HL1's mute, stoic survivalist.
• HL1 has a better core gameplay loop. It plays to its strengths: gunplay & level exploration. Exposition & puzzling are almost always delivered through these mediums wherever possible. Those few chapters which depart from this philosophy (On a Rail, Xen) are the weakest in the whole game as a result.
• HL2, by contrast, seems almost insecure. It only trusts the player to stick with the core gameplay-loop for a few chapters at most before pivoting into yet another gimmick -- almost all of which (barring the gravity gun sequence) feel painfully drawn out:
  • Water Hazard: Boating
  • Highway 17: Driving
  • Sandtraps: Physics "Puzzling" + "Platforming"
  • Nova Prospekt: Wave-Based Point Defense

What do you guys think? There's a lot worth unpacking here which I couldn't quite articulate. What are your takeaways?

Why YSK: right now, Lemmy's autocomplete for the !community syntax isn't working correctly.

It will appear to work, like so:

But the link produced will redirect you away from your home instance and leave you unable to vote/subscribe...

To fix this issue, you'll need to manually edit the autocompleted link like so:

BAD LINK: [!youshouldknow@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/c/youshouldknow)

⬇️⬇️⬇️ Remove the domain (i.e.: https://lemmy.world) & append the @ identifier (i.e.: @lemmy.world)

GOOD LINK: [!youshouldknow@lemmy.world](/c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world)

Removing the domain like this transforms it into a local link which prevents the instance redirection. Doing this will make it easier for newcomers to join your community and participate in discussions!

Those interested can monitor Github issues #369 & #1048 for when this UI bug is fixed!