Don’t know if you’ve tried this before, but there at a few guides for getting the mod working on Linux. This might help?

https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=147190

The mod has been consistently going since 2005, so they’ve had a lot of time to build up assets! There’s a lot of snazzy new features, but everything still aims to integrate with Freelancer’s original setting and lore. Mixed success, but it works more often than not. There’s a community Discord if you wanted to take a look around or ask questions.

Do you know where that link happened to be? I’m wondering if it could be dredged up with the Wayback machine.

We’ve got a Discord server if you want to drop by and take a look around. :)

Yep! Discovery alone has been going since 2006, and has had a 24/7 multiplayer server running consistently that entire time (barring minor outages from faults and attacks). Pretty incredible really.

I also don’t like thinking about it because I first registered an account on their forum in 2007… really puts the inexorable march of time into perspective.

You can host your own server too, although there’s a few steps you need to follow to get FLServer working properly. There’s instructions on the Discovery forums for that.

Freelancer is 2003 Microsoft abandonware which still has an online mod community. Most prominent is probably the Discovery mod, which hosts a 24/7 RP server.

https://discoverygc.com/

That’s a hell of a nostalgia trip. Freelancer is probably my all time favourite game, and I had literally a decade of fond memories of Disco before I eventually drifted off.

What’s it looking like these days? The pop count and surviving factions were looking a little sad the last time I checked in a year or two ago.

The two YouTube links from Haelian in my summary set up the context for why this is really hard, and then commentary on the actual run itself.

Those last few seconds were absolutely hair-raising, even if we already knew how it was going to end!

See you in 200 hours, enjoy!

Also, if you’re playing for the first time maybe don’t watch those videos until you’ve completed at least one run for spoiler reasons.

Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.

Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.

Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.

That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.