tjhart85

I’d say support, whether it be official or unofficial is a thing you didn’t mention.

Try googling any printer you’re looking at + any random common error (not sticking to bed, not heating up, slicer options, etc…) and see what kind of results pop up and if they look helpful.
Look up parts costs and see how they look and if they’re proprietary or not.
See if there are official maintenance recommendations, etc…,

One of my printers is one that has ZERO support from the community and what you can get from the manufacturer is limited and it kind of sucks when I have problems with it.

Enders for all their faults at least have an insane community support (note: in 2024 I would never recommend an Ender 3/5 as a first printer).

My most reliable printer is a Qidi Smart-3 … vendor support has been great and the Facebook groups for it have been good too. The downsides: z-offset is manual & it’s 185x185 which is pretty tiny and it’s a bit of a pain to change the filament.
Upsides: core xy, fast, reliable, klipper
From what I’ve seen though, quality control is hit or miss, but the manufacturer seems to take care of you, so YMMV, mine hasn’t had problems that weren’t self induced.

From what I understand due to the way that Lemmy handles federation, it doesn’t (currently?) have a way to handle an instance changing its domain name and still being able to communicate or even an individual user changing their instance and retaining their comments/votes/etc… (this might be more ActivityPub limited since the way Mastodon does it still seems pretty hacky and just a work around for underlying issues).

From a website perspective, yeah, just change some settings and you’re good to go and accessible on the web, but that doesn’t mean that anything regarding Lemmy is going to actually work.

I’ve got a Qidi Smart3 and it’s made me enjoy 3D printing again!

I’ve got 3 other printers and they’re such a chore, but the Qidi is just a little powerhouse that works fantastically. Qidi needs to come out with competition for the Bambu AMS and they’d have more of my money in a heartbeat.

I mean, kind of … I have file servers, download servers, documentation servers, syncthing servers, backup servers, vaultwarden servers, etc… that are all linux VMs/containers and my main machine is a Macbook, but I do still have a Windows machine in the living room for gaming (yeah, Steam has pushed us far in this regard, but, when I get time to play a game, I just want to play it, I want the best chance it’s going to work the first time and that’s still, sadly, Windows). I have another windows machine running Blue Iris as my NVR because I didn’t have a good experience with Frigate, Shinobi or a few others. I’ve got a few other systems floating around that do various things and some of them are linux based and some are windows based depending on what’s easier/possible.

Yeah, but, I don’t see how that really changes anything.

On a smaller instance (or one that’s defederated from others … in either direction), that might very well completely shift focuses.

For the Fediverse specific community, if you want one with the most chance of getting to the developers, use the instance that they’re on, otherwise, I’d think to just let the cultures develop and diverge naturally as they’re likely to.

To be fair, to some of us this is a feature not a bug.

A technology post on a technology/infosec/IT focused instance seems to have a COMPLETELY different focus and conversation than one on the larger instances, for example and I don’t want those mixed in with people saying that AI is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

There are smaller dedicated art focused instances popping up too. I’d expect that they’re going to have a better set of conversations around those subjects than the same threads on a general instance and I don’t want those mixed up.

If it’s a subject I really want to see a lot of discussion about, I’ll look at multiple threads… can this mean that some subjects won’t have as good of a conversation because people aren’t bouncing off of each other? Yeah, absolutely and that frankly SUCKS, but, as stated, it also means that some of the niche conversations have a chance to grow where they may have previously just been unseen due to how many people are talking.

To me, they’re on different instances for a reason, let it grow organically. The ones that stand out will wind up being the main ones people use.

As for amount of users. A decent amount of those are likely alts people created when instances were having problems or just to try out the different locations.
Or, people just didn’t like the Fediverse for all the reasons you stated, which is also possible, but I don’t necessarily think chasing numbers should be the end all goal

More -> Activity
Will also show the favorites and reduces for an ind post as well.

Works great for me too and has tons of options and flexibility.

No clue what they’re talking about other than they clearly don’t like FOSS:
Like most FOSS software, it’s ugly and doesn’t work.

For me, I wouldn’t say it’s ugly either, FWIW