PleasantAura

Having played Halo CE for PC recently...no, it doesn't have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.

It's the cost of federation with instances that try to be giant general-purpose instances (.world and .ee, mostly): just constant shitty takes that overwhelm participants in the conversation. Federation works far better with lots of small purpose-driven instances instead of gigantic ones; my small (<1000 users) specific community-focused Mastodon instance sees absolutely nothing like this and is full of people who intentionally engage in good-faith conversation with the rest of the community while every large instance I've seen has the same issues as centralized social media in that regard.

Is there another alternative? Bandcamp is the only similar website that a lot of artists I enjoy use.

Almost none of these groups actually care about the kids. Most of them actively support policies that are proven to enable/cause more abuse because it feels like they're hurting the bad guys. As a childhood survivor of a bunch of awful shit that I don't want to get into specifics on, I've never seen a single "for the children" group advocate anything that wouldn't have caused more trauma for me when I was younger. There's no care about fixing problems and preventing childhood trauma/abuse, just care about asserting control and investing in what "feels good": retributive justice (that's more likely to cause recidivism) against one single specific style of abuser while ignoring others (and the survivors) entirely.

This is more about feeling good (and, for some, more authoritarian control) than about actually helping the issue of child abuse.

It's pretty similar to most other roleplay in an RPG in my experience: you remember that you're all playing characters and you respect out-of-character boundaries (including fade to black for anything too explicit or indulgent). I've been worried about crossing boundaries before but I don't think I've ever actually crossed a line over the course of quite a few campaigns, even with the couple of times I've had to fade to black. You just have to know your players and be explicit about boundaries; I've had players request that no romance be present in a game before and I've accommodated that as well as players who've explicitly stated that they want to play flirtatious characters (though not in the same game, obviously).

And of course just be cognizant of how much detail you're going into; you don't want to be describing the details of a makeout scene, but "Jessica presses in for a long kiss" does the job and doesn't violate most people's boundaries in my experiences as long as they're okay with the general themes.

Never really had it go "weird", and honestly, though I've ended up in an IRL relationship with a player in one of my games on two separate occasions, the in-game romance doesn't seem to be related (neither of the people I ended up dating stood out in that regard).

Someone has to subscribe to a community from an instance for it to become initially federated with lemmy.one (or vice versa). If it's a small instance, that might not have happened yet. Additionally, some instances take a while to federate comments/posts, so it can just be that natural lag. This might not be 100% accurate but I think the basics are right.

If you're watching movies with friends and want a FOSS alternative, Jellyfin is the way to go. It's basically a way to host a media streaming center that others can connect to. It might be a bit overkill depending on your needs, but it's great for that exact purpose. It doesn't have chat or anything, though, so you'll want to keep something else around for that.

Huh. I've been getting old posts too unless I sort by new but I assumed it was related to that. I also can't look at subscribed communities or all communities on Jerboa anymore.

It's probably related to the fact that this instance didn't update to the latest software yet (unless I missed it) but I'm not certain of that so don't take my word as gospel.

Yep! As soon as I have storage for that I'll play around with it.

Thank you! I'll probably repurpose an old PC to reduce costs when I do because I have a little bit of hand me down stuff, but it's not enough to really run a server that hosts anything important on so I'll probably have to supplement (and yeah, the storage thing).

Thanks! The awesome communities around a lot of this stuff really helped me get into these things too. I got lucky enough to get a decent soldering station recently too (gift from family) so hopefully I also start to make a bit of progress. Honestly, having things break that I know logically have to be simple to fix was what got me most interested; why should we throw a set of speakers or a kitchen appliance into a landfill just because there's damage to a single wire? And it really hasn't been too intimidating so far.

And this whole shift to the fediverse has made me super interested in running my own server locally, both for storage purposes (I need too much storage space >.>) and for the sake of having the ability to host whatever I want locally - but I haven't really played around with that yet since it costs a decent bit of money even buying used server stuff from China.