Am I right in assuming that - API wise - the bot only interacts with ponder.cat, and doesn’t make calls to the remote instance? (I’m wondering if there’s any barriers to it operating with communities that aren’t on a Lemmy instance).

Yes, that's right. It should work fine on a non-Lemmy instance.

Does the bot resolve the human first, check what they moderate, and then resolve the community if they moderate it, or just always resolve the community, and then compare its moderators with who made the request? If its the latter, this could be a way for bad actors to crowbar a community onto your instance (assuming it doesn’t purge it if things don’t match up, of course).

It's the latter. I think it's okay. The same thing can happen on any instance where someone can search for a community from any other instance.

What would have happened if Otter had sent /add https://lemmy.ca/feeds/c/medicine.xml medicine@lemmy.ca ? Would this be like that time when someone put ‘google’ into google.com, and the Internet blew up?

It's limited to one posting every 5 minutes per feed, so the damage would be limited, but you're right that it would enter an infinite loop and post once every five minutes until someone put a stop to it.

I am not an enthusiast. I just know some people who are.

I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. EUCs are faster and more powerful, to the point that you'll need a lot of safety gear or else you might get really badly hurt. People get passionate about them and carry them everywhere and get carried away with tinkering with them, and it becomes part of their personality. But they are useful to the point of becoming a part of your transportation method. You have to carry it with you, which is less convenient than nothing but more convenient than having to find a place to put a whole car or bicycle.

The two are similar in the sense of being one-wheel vehicles you stand on, but their niches are different enough that it makes sense to me that the groups are pretty disjoint. I don't know of any "group" for one-wheels analogous to the one for EUCs.

There is also !communities@ponder.cat for yet another source for new communities you might not be familiar with.

Perfect sense. I don't think that's any kind of official expose by Target, only one person talking about their experience. But you're right that it's not conclusive one way or another.

That sounds perfect. Installing the system -devel package and -lfreetype is the right way to do it. Glad you got it working!

I edited it to add it.

I'll make an AI chatbot that only wants to talk about Dark Souls. How about that, as a compromise?

I want to have artistic and photographic content and make the interface less GTK-like, especially on mobile, to try to make it acceptable to the normal people. I am techie so I think it will always have a significant tech vibe, but yes. If it had about 80% fewer people talking about Linux and US politics, I think that would represent a big improvement in the experience.

It'd be easy to do. What did you want to have combined? I'm not sure it would be much better than people subscribing to multiple communities to combine different feeds together, but what were you thinking?

I said that I would mirror any community, but I thought about it more, and now I am worried about creating spam. I agree with the other posters that the community ambassador feature would be a better way to do this.

Maybe an IPv6 issue? Can one of the admins see what the error is on their end when the communication with rss.ponder.cat is attempted?

Let's have it 😄