Unfortunately, for a lot of stuff, there just isn’t a replacement from Reddit currently. Your best bet would be trying to find other local news sources and follow them individually, likely with an RRS.

That said, if you have the time and energy, the only way Lemmy will grow is with active users. If you join one or more of the more active Lemmy communities (likely the one Sunshine suggested) and try to post when you can, that goes a long way to either keeping these smaller communities alive, or helping them grow.

If all your art looks like the single image provided, then the honest answer would be yes, unfortunately. That said, one image with minimal content isn’t much to go off, and as with any skill, this will change over time, esspecially with practice. Notably, this also looks like something dedicated to a loved one, so at that point intent matters more than artistic skill anyway.

I’m against banning things. It’s better to teach users how not to use these platforms.

Just because there’s deeper root causes, doesn’t mean the end result shouldn’t be banned if its immoral or destructive. In particular, we figure out what parts of it are problematic enough to be worth banning, and ban those: I.E. the heavily biased algorithm which users have no control over.

Aside from that, theres also the option of providing alternatives. Said alternatives don’t even have to be publicly run. It could come in the form of something like a one-time grant to Mastrodon and opening up a server exclusively for government departments to share announcements or PR with the public.

At this point, I’m mostly just trying to figure out what my options are. Trying to search Mechanical Keyboards dot com just burries me in results with no meaningful way to filter them. PcPartPicker is slightly better, but lacks most of the dedicated keyboard brands. The only site I’d found that offered thorough filters was Memoey Express, although their selection was also very limited. The other comment suggesting Keeb-Finder was pretty much exactly what I was looking for (although a lot of the results aren’t available in Canada, but its still far better).

I didn’t expect to get my answer from a marketing spam bot (nontheless one that can’t even link the relevant website properly), but here we are. Keeb-Finder was what I was looking for.

When you compare that to the amount of memory in video game consoles, they had to keep things simple and couldn’t afford to go fill professional digital audio.

This was my intended point. The problem wasn’t digital verus analog. It was more that home computers couldn’t run something as complex as a game with resources that high-quality. Even 3D games following 1995 (since that was the start of at-home, 3D games) were running at low resolutions with low poly, low-res assets and lower quality sound because anything more would be too expensive.

In 1995 CDs were already well-established and quickly becoming the standard. Digital audio had already been around for decades, and the main distribution method was digital.

American cops are kinda average compared to the global stage. Most of Europe, for example, has much more restrained, much less incompetent cops. On the other hand, much of the world has cops much worse than the US. I have a family member who lived in one of the less stable African countries, who recounted seeing a bunch of cops beat a child for “daring” to wear camo pants, and that wasn’t considered particularly shocking.

There’s a couple factors, but to oversimplify, games are just very complicated. If you had a high-end recording studio, you might have a high-end computer (for the time) to digitize recorded audio. You just need to basically record a microphone and be able to play it back, so its not too complicated anyway. In the same vein, for animation and CGI, a studio would have super high-end computers, and even then it would often take days for the computer to process a single high-quality image or much longer for animation.

Compare that to games, where you need to generate an image in about one 30th of a second. At the same time, the game has to also play back sound, handle a bunch of extra input and logic for the game, and has to do it all on a computer that an average family can afford.

Sounds like you’ve basically got yourself covered. Beyond that, I’d recommend just trying to make sure your current methods are sustainable (IE, you won’t have to switch back in a year) and trying to find ways to help others.

Some other ways the can help reduce US influence off the top of my head, ordered roughly from least to most difficult:

• Do your research and vote
• Use networked platforms (like the Fediverse) more, to help them compete with big american tech
• Promote Canadian or non-US alternatives
• put together detailed resources to help others boycott US products (IE, blog posts about how you addressed specific issues or infographics explaining the alternatives to common american products.)
• Join local groups to become more connected with your community
• Volunteering
• Becoming involved in politics, be it helping campaign for important causes or running yourself.

Yes, a lot of these aren’t directly targeting the US, but the stronger Canada is, the less power the US has over us.