davetansley

About 13 years ago, I made this fella.

https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg

It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.

It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.

This!

Coding isn’t for everyone, but sometimes you can get involved in a coding project just by contributing good suggestions/bug reports to github.

Be thoughtful about how you report things - if you’re reporting a bug, add as much detail as you can to help the devs recreate it; if you’re suggesting a feature, make a solid case for why the application might benefit from it, think about potential issues it might solve (or cause), consider how you might address users who don’t want that feature (make optional).

It is extremely satisfying to see an issue you’ve reported get fixed or a feature you’ve suggested get implemented. It gives you a stake in the project, something you won’t often get on the corporate-owned platforms.

Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he’d raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up…

As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.

Back when I first started using the internet, early-mid 90s, there was a feeling that we were in control - the users. The giant corporations hadn’t taken over yet, content was all user generated, the apps and early sites were all user run. It was weird, uncontrolled, unpredictable, janky as hell… but also really cool.

Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, feel like that again.

I’m almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I’d like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It’s early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the “right” direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)

That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:

1. Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn’t intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as “search for a topic, hit subscribe”. Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.

2. UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.

Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there’s definitely a lot of promise here.