I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like “if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to” and “I don’t have to align it by eye, it’s a computer”.

And I’m definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn’t need to be on at all… it’s just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It’s pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

I wonder if China has a favorite.

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!

@ono perfect, for some reason all I could see was what was on the front page.

I suggest that you don’t worry very much about how many people read your posts, especially in early days. I’ve seen people super stressed about how they can’t make their posts on Mastodon go viral enough. The scale here will be smaller.

Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.

In the real world I can’t even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.

The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren’t necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo’d into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.

Is there another way? We’re assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you’ll find one on a different instance…

I expect people will see there’s existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.