It would be nice if instances automatically maintained a new and low connection count user feed so that people could browse it occasionally and help people find others to connect with.

That could be done either as part of the instance software or via a bot that runs through the instance user list and updates the feed every so often.

Yes! This is it right here, this is how you grow the fediverse. Props to UoG for figuring this out early! Here’s to hoping that other universities catch on that providing Mastodon hosting to their employees and students has more value than offloading all of that discussion onto Twitter or Facebook where it can be shaped by a potentially hostile corporate owner.

Lemmy and Mastodon have an equal amount of shitposting and meme content in my experience

Lemmy, I like the simple post structure with all related commentary under the original submission.

Mastodon is fine for people who like it but it’s hard to follow the thread of replies as every reply is its own individual post.

I guess the twatter format makes sense for dashing off quick messages but I find it hard to follow and it’s difficult to find communities and topics of interest without also including a shit-ton of noise along with the signal.

Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don’t just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta’a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don’t go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well. This enables public discussion with the org in twitter/social media format without a third party controlling the platform.

Over/under on the 4.0 release? 2045?

Edit: Gimp 2.0 was released in 2004

I mean, that’s your path forward if you want a current graphics stack. Linux Mint is a Ubuntu derivative, there’s no supported frankendistro that updates everything on your current mint release to current versions of the kernel, drivers, mesa and all the rest of the libraries you want for up to date software support - you get that with a rolling release distro rather than a snapshot distro frozen 6-24mo ago when they cut your current release version.

That’s not really the case with current Nvidia GPUs (yet anyway) - the Nvidia provided dkms driver is the best option outside very limited use cases

There’s not really an upgrade path from Mint to a rolling release distro like Fedora or Arch. The simplest thing to do is rsync -axHAX your /home directory onto external storage and then install Fedora, Bazzite, Arch or EndeavourOS and copy data back as needed.

They’re engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.

Friends don’t let friends run Manjaro. Endeavour is a great place to start.