One big difference I see, between email and various messengers on the on side and social networks on the other side is, that emails are me pushing my information at people while a social network is supposed to be them pulling information from my feed. This allows me—when it works—to share stuff with people instead of potentially sending spam. Not all communication is a digital postcard. Social networks allowed a new form of communication. I enjoyed OG facebook until the first big privacy scandal. It was a (mostly) good thing and it was very accessible even then. I‘ve never got such a large part of my tribe on a pull service since then. Sure we all have messengers and groups and what not… but it is not the same. I dream of self-hosting something from the fediverse but we‘re not exactly young anymore and I doubt my tribe will assemble.

I have already written more comments here than I ever did on reddit. I want lemmy to succeed and it needs even us lurkers to do that. It ain’t much–but I am commenting ;)

there were some really decent TTS mods when I Last used TTS. in any case I highly recommend finding someone to teach you the game if you don’t know it already. I have more than once encountered people saying they didn’t enjoy the game only to change tune after getting a teacher. It is not even that the rulebooks are bad. It is just a lot of moving parts.

Over several iterations the Spirit Island app became good enough. However, as much as I love the game, it is immensely difficult to play in digital. Even when on my large monitor, I cannot show everything at the same time and I need to switch between maps and cards and I find it makes for much added difficulty. I have stopped playing the digital version. I have not played Scythe enough to be able to say anything about that app.

It‘s not just about the data—which is bad enough but as you said they could just write a crawler to get at it. The question is why would they want to federate and why now? Meta being Meta the most likely reasons are terrible for the fediverse and it reminds me very much of Google and xmpp. I saw a really good writeup on this yesterday: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

• Spirit Island. My overall favorite game since my first play of it. Plays great solo as a single or as 2 spirits. Coop games in general are good for solos because you can run them multihanded if necessary
• Dune Imperium has an automa based solo mode that luckily is simple enough to run
• On the hard to find side: Leaving Earth–space race simulation. I haven’t played that many solos of it but it is a grandiose thing to be launching a moon mission and testing Saturn rockets.
• most of the big Uwe Rosenberg games have excellent solo modes. My favorites are Nusfjord and Oranienburger Kanal. But A Feast for Odin with the Norwegians expansion is also very good!
• I recently got Legacy of Yu which is a solo only campaign game that reminds me of Paladins of the West Kingdom but is much easier to run as a solo because it was designed as such.
• Imperium: Classics and Legends are very versatile and once one understands the basics of how to run the opponents they aren’t that difficult to grok.
• As I mentioned on the small games thread I love Ark Nova and Revive as solos.
• Obsession - tile laying, worker placement, card-game mashup that I recently found out I prefer solo on the table as opposed to multiplayer online.

I am not a fan of having to run automas so I prefer games that can be soloed without complex bot actions. Dune Imperium is one automa deck that I can stomach.

Hope you are having fun with it :) I never travel without it. Sometimes I play a game with morning coffee or during lunchbreak. Those 18 different goals are enough for endless combinations.

• My favorite solo game is Sprawlopolis (and its siblings Agropolis and Naturopolis, but OG remains the best). It is just 18 cards and I have played it over and over.
• I enjoy the solo mode of Cascadia quite a bit, especially the various challenges.
• Sagani works very well as a solo puzzle.
• Depending on what qualifies as small, 51st State plays really fast as a solo and I’ve enjoyed all my plays quite a bit. I admit I haven’t even played this multiplayer yet
• Two games that do not themselves qualify as small but have much faster playing solo modes than multiplayer are Ark Nova and Revive. Love both of them.

• Railroad Ink and other roll and write games might work.
• The tiles from Kingdomino are quite thick and shouldn’t fly away at a slight breeze.
• Trick Taking games may work well, I have played lots of Skat outside way back when
• Kakerlakensalat and Dodelido don‘t take up a lot of space and worked well for us recently