Thanks for the behind the scenes look. I think this sort of thing is very helpful for instances to do with the influx of new/potential members. Instance longevity is a big factor when deciding where to spend my time contributing to, and the transparency helps instill confidence!

After playing through a few times, my advice is to embrace manifold layouts because they are easy to set up and even easier to expand (especially with blueprints). Pick a recipe to work on, and for each ingredient dedicate a line of producers to it. Do the same for the next ingredient, etc.

The key to this is that if (when) you need to extend your production of the goal recipe, all you need to do is add on to each line proportionally. Thus, you can set this up fairly early and just expand on it as you progress.

Note that you do absolutely end up making many lines of, say, iron plates and other early products; the goal isn’t to have only one line of each item, but rather to dedicate expandable lines to specific individual items (sometimes redundantly).

Also, the early belts do limit you and it certainly makes more sense to use load balancing rather than manifolds at that point, but you also don’t need to wait until the final tier of belts to start using manifolds.

Some good points by the author, especially around us likely being in a state of flux in the social aspect of the Internet.

One thing that I don’t agree with is that lemmy and other fediverse options have “a long way to go” to shore up the onboarding process. Sure, the concept of the fediverse is fairly unfamiliar to people. And yes it’s currently a little clunky to sign up…

But with some honestly pretty minor handholding added to the onboarding process, and some nice polish, people would have no problem picking an instance and signing up; “tell us your interests and we’ll show you some home bases for you to pick from.” And then boom, they’re in!

Default to “all” rather than “local”, and people will be able to ease in to this new experience without too much delta from what they’re used to–and people can onboard without ever needing to learn about the unfamiliar fediverse concept. They can learn that on their own time, after finding content and a community that speaks to them.

At least in my experience (which is admittedly limited in the fediverse at this point), it seems to be that the concept that lemmy is hard to onboard is because we’re trying to teach people about the underlying tech during the onboarding process rather than helping people get through the door to a familiar experience.

My tip for peas is that they need full sun, and don’t like the mid summer heat. I have had peas in the corner of my garden for two years and they hardly produced anything both years. I decided to move them over to the middle of the garden with much more sun this year, and success! Lots of fruit.

Pro tip: you can pair peas with pole beans on to the same trellis. The peas will be finishing up just as the pole beans are sending their first foot or so of vines up. It takes some careful removal of the pea plants but by doing this you can get both peas and beans in your prime trellis spot in the garden. Runner beans are too early for this to work well though.

Wow that’s a ton of flowers! Ours flowered after its first year with us this year; hopefully next year it will be happy enough to flower like this too

Well, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to help you with your issue but yes, you can avoid them by going out in the early morning before their hives have warmed up or in the late evenings after they have gone back to the hive for the night.

Also, in general bees are fairly localized; they fly within two miles or so from their hive and capitalize on preferred nectar and pollen sources when they are available. So, perhaps there are certain problem areas that are close to a hive or close to some attractive flowers.

Lastly, you may not be getting stung by honey bee.