That’s where I’m at, nice place!

I’m not sure about overall activity, but I do know my feed is active enough that i can’t read ALL of it unless I spend like an hour or more per day on here, and that’s plenty active for me.

I’m sorry, but you can’t stop me from trying to eat this.

Omg I have been rabidly following Blades of Furry, that comic rules.

One of my boyfriends is really into (and good at) fighting games. I haven’t even played one in decades, and when I did it was just to button mash lol. I wanted to play with him so I’ve been deep diving into those. Now we play Battle Craze together.

I migrated to the flagship PieFed instance a while ago and haven’t regretted it at all. This place rocks! I would love it if there was an app though, not a big fan of PWAs lol. If I was smarter, I’d try to make one myself. Very exciting to see more instances popping up!

For some reason I’m picturing them all with little Studio Ghibli style faces?

I enjoy the deranged erotica, partially because it’s good but also because it makes the toxic alpha male/sigma male dudebro types go “no, not like that!”

I assumed, by “They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.”, that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn’t realize their instances were already closed-registration.

Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.

I don’t run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.

I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?

Mirlo.space is working on federation too. I think they’re not as far along in that regard, but further along in terms of being a bandcamp replacement? Last I heard, anyway. I buy stuff from there, payment works.

A lot of public libraries offer access to ReferenceUSA through your library card. I vaguely remember that queries are pretty customizable on there, and exportable to various formats. Despite the generic name, it’s specifically for businesses. Would that work?

How was it? I’ve been ordering mesquite flour online because we don’t have any species of them where I live lol.

This is awesome, I hope I get one near me someday.

Adeem the Artist, on repeat, since I only just discovered them lol.

I can’t say that the ability to follow individual people is really something I care about, but coming from Piefed, it does seem to work just fine. So does Peertube and any of the other ones I’ve bothered to try.

Wow, AND it broke despite being one of the strongest types of spider web! On the other hand, I think the way they plied it is not how things are supposed to be done, for good reason. Correct plying ought to make a world of difference. From what i saw in the video, it only seems like a lot of web if it needs to be continuous. To make yarn, it’s not at all atypical to spin many shorter fibers together rather than few long ones. And caterpillar tents are super abundant! The differences in strength between insect webs might still be a real issue though.

Somebody else mentioned that they think caterpillar tent silk just balls up into a big stacky wad, so you might need to submerge it in something that would cut the stickiness first. That also made me think of another possibility. What if, instead of spinning it as-is, you dissolved it in a solvent and then electrospun it onto a rotating spool? And then plied the result?

Done, thanks!

Sounds interesting, sure! What would that entail?

My prior Lemmy instance (lemmy.one) is abandoned and slowly losing functionality, and I had to find somewhere new to move, so I figured… why not PieFed? I like if so far! Seems to be playing well with the other thread platforms, hopefully I’m doing it right.

Feel free to post your work if you get back into textiles again!