This is the big one I want too. I'd love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi's and start getting content they're interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.
US "news" is billionaire propaganda designed to push whatever world view best supports their financial interests and/or any bizarre philosophy they've decided is most correct
They're using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It's time tested and it works.
When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven't used the platform since.
The BBC, NPR and the NY Times. NPR in their effort to seem unbiased allows Republicans to frame the discussion of all things political and NPR participates rather than calling out obvious falsehoods or reframing any issue around facts. I bucket them firmly in the neoliberal controlled opposition camp. The NYT has become yet another corporate mouthpiece and the BBC does whatever they do. I never paid much attention to CNN but I engage with them even less now that they've switched to FOX's manufactured outrage "entertainment" model rather than engaging in journalism.
So, uh, all of those? I can't handle popular Republican "news" sources, they tend to twist facts in the name of this week's political expediency or simply lie.
Edit: I'd like to say "literally any corporate news source" here too, all of them present a view of the world that reinforces their owners' worldview and/or lobbies in their interest. All media should be carefully evaluated for a slant that benefits the owner of the publication regardless of their apparent political stance.
Try searching for authors who describe their work as "Speculative fiction" - that's the way most of them don't admit to writing low-brow schlock like sci-fi.
Also near future sci-fi tends to be a bit lighter on the "magical machine" plot tropes. Climate fiction might be worth looking into too, most of the near future books exploring possible global warming consequences aren't all hopped up on magical technological advances.
Edit: also check out various books described as literary speculative fiction. Authors who want the intellectual cred of being a literary writer tend to land in the speculative fiction genre more often than not.
I had to set one of these up for my SO a couple of years ago. I dropped EndeavourOS on it, installed btrbk and configured automatic snapshots on a schedule and before package installation/update in case she managed to bork things by pip installing things into system python.
Fedora would probably work well too if you want a lower maintenance burden. I hesitate to suggest Ubuntu or Debian or their derivatives since you'll probably want to be somewhat current with your Nvidia drivers.
Honestly, unless the community can all get behind one set of recommendations it's going to fall on whoever's running the instance.
I'm really hoping we see some kind of server side community bundling sometime soon because that would make it possible for users to curate bundles of communities themselves and people could just subscribe to those if building a subscription list is too much effort. Present new users on an instance with the top 5 or 10 bundle feeds and let them explore those while they build their own subscription selection.
EDIT: fuck, it just clicked me why you said so. Discord might be a good place to advertise Lemmy, indeed - good catch.
I just drop Lemmy post links the way I used to drop reddit links and answer questions if someone asks about Lemmy. That's really all it takes to draw interested people in over time.
I drop links to interesting Lemmy posts into discord and my other communication channels in moderation and it's hooked a couple of handfuls of my friends enough to make an account and join. Reddit spread because people linked to useful communities there often, we can do the same thing here with time and effort. We're not going to see explosive growth the way a commercial enterprise would, we don't have the marketing budget or the salaried people paid to grow the community, we have to do it ourselves slowly and consistently like we have been. Make useful posts, link people to the site, do what you can to reduce the barrier to entry for new folks, etc etc.
The barrier to entry on Lemmy is pretty huge for new people. You have to sort through anywhere between dozens and thousands of instances (after you figure out what an instance even is) then pick one that hopefully aligns with your values (and if you guessed wrong you have to uproot yourself and start all over again.) After that you can either drink from the firehoses (/c/all or /c/local) or if that's too overwhelming or full of porn or anime vore furry fan art then you need to sit down and commit to hours or days of manually building your own subscription feed from the tens of thousands of available communities. Then, finally, if you stuck it out through all of the above you can start interacting with the rest of the Lemmy community and be welcomed by the well intentioned and constructive posters of instances like .ml. It's a lot to ask of someone who wants Reddit but without spez or Nazis and not that many people are motivated to persist through all of it.
If I had to suggest one way to reduce that barrier to entry I'd suggest building a default set of subscriptions (maybe take all of the trending communities from the last 12 or 18mo and put them in a feed) so that new people can start participating more quickly. I think that would reduce the "fuck this I give up" rate considerably.
A lot of communities moved to Discord, and I mean a lot of them. I don't think that was the right call, Discord and Slack are absolutely the wrong tools to maintain a forum, but it was easy and familiar so they hoovered up a lot of communities.
I don't have any Internet connected smart devices in my house and I keep a baseball bat handy in case my printer exhibits threatening behavior. Computers are not to be trusted.
I wrote simple hooks for my package manager to fire system snapshots before I install or update any package. It's a nice safety belt that I've never actually needed to use, but if I do need it it's there.
This is the big one I want too. I'd love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi's and start getting content they're interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.