Starting my day off with this absolutely cursed image, thank you OP.

It’s been common for a lot longer than that in the UK, we’re very lazy :D

Yeah I’m trying to remember how we used to do it (the last time I went through a normal checkout with a full shop was probably 10 years ago) and this seems right.

Gotta have the heavy stuff handy so you can put it straight into the bottom of the bags. Anything else is wasting time!

Alas, not really! I have a cheap shuttle and am still trying to get the hang of “the flip” but I’ll get it eventually. I did manage a sort of wonky snowflake but that’s about it so far. Trouble is, as you know, all the other hobbies getting in the way 😄

Currently working on cross stitching a dragon from the Discworld books, knitting some crazy speckly socks and a shawl that is way behind where it needs to be to be finished on time, and planning various sewing projects. RIP my free time.

Just left another comment with links to some of the more active craft communities on here, we’d love to see what you’re working on if you ever want to share!

We do a lot of hanging out and gossiping on fedi tbf. Mastodon is really big on crafts, and on Lemmy we have places like !knitting@lemmy.world, !crochet@lemmy.ca, !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works, !sewing@lemmy.world etc for specific crafts.

For the crafts a bit too niche to have their own active community, !imadethis@lemm.ee loves to see completed projects!

Gonna tag @DharmaCurious@startrek.website and @OftenWrong@startrek.website too because I feel like a lot of folks don’t realise how much craft stuff we have on here!

I’ve taught a few people to crochet and all it really takes is patience, and and accepting that you’re going to feel like you’ve somehow got both too many and also not enough hands for the first little while. There’s no shortage of tutorials online so it’s just a question of finding a beginner one that clicks with you and going from there.

And if you get stuck, need to ask newbie questions, or just want to show off the first few wonky rows of stitches you make to people who will understand what an achievement it is, !crochet@lemmy.ca is the community for you!

I immediately thought of tatting just because it’s kind of interesting that you can do it two such different ways with such different tools, and also because using a shuttle looks like actual witchcraft.

This is definitely a cool but very niche feature that I and nerds like me would use, but the vast majority of normal* folk never would. So for that reason it’s probably not going to be any kind of priority to add. But hey, in the meantime, we’ve always got footnotes!

* “normal” by Lemming standards, anyway

Hey, bit late to this discussion (found it while searching for something) but since you seemed interested in a casual user’s pov:

I’m a member of quite a few Lemmy communities that are really small, and I’m very active on Mastodon. So having those small communities in a list feed on Mastodon is really handy since I don’t miss anything and can just jump in with a reply on stuff without switching over to Lemmy.

I also post a lot of the same type of stuff to both platforms and sometimes it makes sense to keep that separate, but sometimes with niche interests it’s nice to be able to cross-post and get both groups of people chatting together in the comments.

Of course this is a moot point because federation between my Masto instance and Lemmy is currently broken, but it was really great before and I miss it a ton.

Joined group, still can’t get in on the Play link but I’ve made a note to check back and see if it’s updated tomorrow. What a faff!

Update: store link now works for group members.

Happy to help with the play store test if you decide to try and get the 20 🫡

Yeah I recently helped out with this mandatory testing thing for !raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world, seems it’s a relatively recent new hoop for devs to jump through.

Oh, yesssss.

So excited for this to roll out, I’m sure it’ll need further tweaks as we go but it’s encouraging to hear positive reports from the start!

Seems like the specific issue is this:

• If the community is on your local instance, it doesn’t show the instance in the dropdown. If it’s a remote instance, it does.

• However instead of using the actual unique URL of the community, it uses the display name. So in this case lemmy.ml/c/ireland and lemmy.ml/c/ireland_on_lemmy both have their display name set to just “Ireland”.

I think differentiating between local and remote communities is actually pretty useful but obviously the second thing is a problem when you’ve got competing communities on one server. Which I guess is a thing that people are doing.

Maybe instead of:

• Ireland
• Ireland

it should be showing

• Ireland (/c/ireland)
• Ireland (/c/ireland_on_lemmy)

which not only fixes this problem but also means you can see how to get to a community to go check it out before posting there (this comes up sometimes in the process of crossposting) and it’ll stop, say, a mod giving their community an unrelated name to confuse people into posting something inappropriate or whatever.

There should probably also be a character limit on the display name because that UK one is obnoxiously taking up all of the horizontal space and leaving no room for its actual identifier.

!battletech@lemmy.world and !satisfactory@lemmy.world by the looks of it, for anyone passing by who has an interest in either 😉

I was saying the other day there’s been a noticeable uptick in activity in some of my favourite arts & crafts type communities over the last couple of weeks. Probably just a temporary blip, and our numbers are still quite precarious, but it’s encouraging nevertheless.

For me the level of interesting content is just about spot on now, but obviously it depends on your interests.

I do have one suggestion though. Whenever you feel the urge to comment about how “hobby” communities are too dead, be more specific. Which hobbies? Which communities? Every time you mention one, the chances that someone who didn’t even know it existed sees that comment and finds the community increase.

Look I’ll start. I wish there were more crocheters around to liven up !crochet@lemmy.ca a bit.

Word of mouth is how niche communities grow.

(p.s. also spend some time blocking the news communities if you’re not into that stuff, it makes a massive difference)

Copy-pasting my usual response to these threads:

I’m legally obliged to shill the various crafting communities, my two most used are !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works but you can find lots more in the sticky thread in either of those.

Then there’s also !imadethis@lemm.ee which has been a bit quiet lately so if you’ve made something, go show it off!

• !ukcasual@lemmy.world
• !simpleliving@lemmy.ml and !simpleliving@lemm.ee
• !discworld@lemmy.ml
• !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
• !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
• !artshare@lemmy.world
• !pixelart@lemmy.ml
• !zillowgonewild@midwest.social
• !aesthetic@slrpnk.net and !art@slrpnk.net (actually pretty much anything on slrpnk.net)
• !rpgmemes@ttrpg.network
• !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works and !patientgamers@lemmy.ml
• !mathmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
• !crossview@lemmy.world and !parallelview@sh.itjust.works
• !potatoism@lemmy.world

Yep that’s how all these federated services work. Your instance can only show you stuff it already knows about, so someone needs to have been first to find and follow it.