The more normal transfer path is to offer to take over a specific community or communities by:

1. Reaching out to the existing mod and asking to be added to the mod team.
2. Documenting their lack of response after a few days or a week.
3. Documenting the failure to abide by Lemmy world moderation guidelines: https://lemmy.world/post/424735 by linking spam or off-topic posts and to communities that lack rules/useful-sidebar-content, etc.
4. Posting this info in !moderators@lemmy.world and offering to takeover moderation.

This is better than mass deletion because it keeps whatever small list of existing subscribers and post content intact across the transition. For moderation, Lemmy world admins will get notified of reports and can address anything that violates instance rules.

The Beehaw admins made this choice, and documented their rationale here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

It really does look very much like a parking meter of the time, and the joke doesn't really make sense unless it's a parking meter. It's a rent-seeking/capitalism gag.

• The caveman on the left, is creating something transformatively useful, that once finished will change his life with how useful it is. Aka he's inventing the wheel.
• The caveman on the right is creating something that will act as a small but annoying tax on the work of the caveman on the left... doing nothing of intrinsic value but making the real invention a little bit less useful and helpful by charging the very first wheel for parking. Aka he's inventing useless self absorbed beauracracy, mankind's second most significant invention after the wheel.

The gag establishes the relationship between the two cavemen as a doer on the left and a beauracratic leech on the right. If the right is a scale, there's kind of nothing going on here. Not that there aren't far side comics where nothing is going on, but this one has a gimmick.

Two tips:

I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon.

Steam "just works" on Linux, you can install it via flatpak (which I use) or from their deb repo. It includes "Proton", which is a fancy bundle of wine and some extra open source valve sauce to make it nice and easy to use. Any game that runs on the steam deck also runs on Linux via proton, and there's no messing around at all. It looks and feels just like steam on Windows, and thousands of games just work with no setup or config beyond clicking the big blue and green buttons to install and run. Not EVERY games works, but tons do. I'd heavily recommend this over raw wine to a beginner.

The second tip is not to ask what you can do on Linux. The answer, to a first approximation, is that you can do everything on Linux that you can do on Windows or OSX. I daily drive all three, and mostly do the same stuff on them. Instead, ask YOURSELF what you WANT to do on Linux. Then Google and ask us HOW to do it... or what the nearest approximation is if the precise thing you want to do doesn't work on Linux.

I think a couple things are in play:

• Very few people consumed these comics as we are... reading each one in sequence. You'd more likely sporadically encounter them in the funnies section of a physical newspaper. Which was a pretty hit/miss proposition to begin with. No one expected every one to be a winner, and people would routinely skip over stuff that didn't interest them without thinking about it too hard. You're operating under the assumption that Far Side is a classic, but at the time people would just cruise by and think "that comic is stupid, just like 60% of the other stupid comics on this page". And folks were pretty happy to have 40% of comics be a bit funny.
• What made Far Side a classic was not its consistency. Rather, there were a few strips that became cultural phenomena. Basically a handful of hits that were breakout memes of the 80s and 90s. Colleges used to sell t-shirts of the school for the gifted strip with the kid pushing on the door that says pull, which is pretty accessible and one of those breakout hits.
• Because of those breakout hit strips, some folks got into Larson's style of humor enough that fewer of his strips were inscrutable to them and he had a lasting market.
• Other comments point about topical references and those are also a big deal. If someone sees a beans meme with no context 30y from now, it ain't gonna be funny. But a few weeks ago on lemmy, it was part of a contextual zeitgeist that was more or less about "these idiots will upvote anything, I'm one of the idiots... I'll upvote this!" and it kind of captured the exuberant excitement of not knowing what lemmy was but wanting it to be something. Similarly, these strips often weren't intended to last multiple generations. They assumed you were reading the newspaper RIGHT NOW... and so could reference current events very obliquely and still be accessible.

TLDR: Like a stupid meme, many Larson comics require shared transient context we're missing now. Some are also just fukin weird, like cow tools. But some were very accessible and became hugely popular. These mega-star strips cemented Far Side's popularity, and which gave Larson the autonomy to stay weird when he chose. Now we waste time trying to figure out what they meant.

This, but desktop linux users are on the step for 193rd place while excitedly screaming and holding a third-place sign. Steamdeck users are on the 3rd-place step while calmly playing their deck.

Tests go in !test@lemmy.ml

This looks weird to me.

• Kbin downvotes are public, you can see who made them at https://kbin.social/u/@artifice@lemmy.world. Kbin doesn't federate downvotes from Lemmy though, so you can only see downvotes made there. I stalked your profile a bit on kbin and there was nothing weird. Mostly no downvotes, and in the few cases there were some there was no correlation of people across threads. The worst I saw was like three people downvoting a series of comments in a single thread, which is not weird or stalky.
• Downvotes are also not anonymous to Lemmy instance admins. They are recorded in Lemmy's DB with a link to who made them. This isn't exposed via the web-ui or app-api, so regular users cannot see them... but admins (and users with their own Lemmy instance) can.

I would consider reporting this to info@mastodon.world. If someone is actually sockpuppeting 10-20 accounts and profile stalking, that sounds to me like bannable abuse and something the admins might be interested in looking into. Now, of course, if you're the one who has been harassing people in old comments, moderated comments, deleted comments, or DMs... admins might decide to ban you all. Two wrongs don't make a right, and often result in two bans. It's also possible that admins have bigger fish to fry and won't have time to investigate... but if I were admin I'd be interested in early instances of mass-sockpuppeting so I could think about ways to detect and react to it.

Edit: As an aside, the animated profile icon is pretty annoying and it may be that people downvote just for that.

I thought that was the first rule of rendering web content? Or was it protocol parsers?

I remember, it was first rule of video game character creation screens:

Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It's not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you're actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.

But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin'ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don't read.

These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default... So you're more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot's docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you're getting into.

• https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
• https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs

I blame unfederated subscriber counts. If you look up any community from an account on lemmy.world and there is a local version and a remote version... the local version LOOKS bigger when it's about half the size because the remote version only shows subscribers from lemmy.world whereas the local version shows subs fediverse-wide.

If sub counts were apples to apples for remote and local communities, people would much more frequently sub to the bigger remote comminity. But lemmy.world is so big, that when people are subbing locally because they're confused about which is bigger... the lemmy.world community actually becomes bigger very quickly. So it's winning the community scaling races consistently on pure confusion. The resulting community centralization is not all that healthy and they often overtake better run and more established communities for no meaningful reason.

This is a terrible idea, and borderline irresponsible. One of the key reasons that Lemmy doesn't subscribe by default is to avoid forcing servers with many communities to waste time/CPU delivering messages to servers where no one will read those messages. By subscribing to everything, you're telling all those overloaded servers to waste time sending content to your server that you'll never even see.

• It also will massively inflate your db by multiple GB/day.
• It will maximize the chances of you downloading and hosting copyright infringing content and content that may be illegal in your jurisdiction but not in the jurisdiction where it's hosted (loli, etc).

It is much MUCH better to just hit lemmyverse.net and subscribe to 10-100 communities you care about. If script accepted a list of community-urls and automated subscribing to those, that would be super nice. Subscribing to the entire lemmyverse is terrible for your server, for your hosting liability, and for the lemmyverse's performance.