Sure, but we had Bonzi Buddy too. These days the best we can hope for is some AI that tells us to eat rocks.

“It’s the anxiety associated with real-time conversations, potential awkwardness, not having the answers and the pressure to respond immediately” - this hits the nail on the head for me about not wanting to be on the phone/teams call in the work place. Being pulled into a call with no context is my biggest nightmare.

Instances are great, but are also a problem for onboarding.

Is there a single point of entry for people now? I can imagine there being a website people could go to that asks a few simple questions and sorts (or load balances) people to certain instances. This would of course need some way for people to transfer their accounts in the future should they not be happy with their instance. Additionally each instance would need to have some kind of API call for the single point of entry to create the accounts You could even have a simple survey to gauge people’s interests to help them in the community filtering process and present the mobile apps that are available.

Just some thoughts of course on how it might be possible to improve the users first experience.

Is the onboarding experience any better? I remember the initial process of joining Lemmy felt very shady and not user friendly. That can be a massive deterrent for people joining. Then on top of that having to filter out all the communities that are not to my taste.

Overall it was a messy non-user friendly experience, but now that I’m here I’m happy.

Have production costs increased or has marketing/publishing costs gone up dramatically as gaming attempts to get a greater demographic and introduce predatory monetisation methods? Tools and techniques for game development surely improve over time making development easier and more cost effective.

If anyone genuinely feels this way and wants to get started in coding, I highly recommend doing one of the mooc.fi courses. Codecademy is fine as a taster/refresh but don’t waste money on the premium when something like mooc is available for free.