Oh damn, that's us!!

We'd wondered where the nearly 1.9k subscribers came from completely out of nowhere!

So, yeah, a lot of people are hating on us for creating one of Kbin and one on Lemmy, but we had our reasons: Basically, neither handled images very well and we saw that these two services did basically the same thing and that typically leads to the weaker project getting cancelled down the line, so we decided our safest bet was just to make one of each, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

We might consolidate them later, but for now just pick whichever you like best. :)

Actually, we did have a small contingent of visually impaired people who enjoyed the subreddit, even if they had to zoom way in to see the details. Most people who are legally blind still have some vision and they still love pleasing arrangements of pixels.

That's why we're trying to make the Lemmy and kbin instances more accessible by adding image transcriptions where possible, a paragraph description explaining the details in the photo so mostly-blind people can enjoy them more.

Also, like, half the mod team is some flavor of disabled, and us cripples gotta stick together.

Image Transcription for the visually impaired:

[ A young shirtless brown-skinned man in his 20s with a faced etched with concentration, tousled brown hair and a short, tidy beard is dramatically caught mid-action, his left arm raised and his biceps flexed in the moment before the snap of the wrist that will send the projectile inside the military-green rock sling hurling forwards towards its target, but for this instant that we see him, the olive-colored rock sling is suspended, taught, in the air above him at a rakish angle. In his right hand he holds the pole of a roughly 3' by 5" flag that unfurls above and behind him. The flag is a red right-facing triangle on the left edge overlaid over a horizontally-striped black, white, and green tricolor: The flag of Palestine. He is garbed only in black athletic shorts (a small white Adidas logo is visible) and a long-sleeved t-shirt that used to be red but has long ago faded to a rust color is tied around his waist giving the appearance of a loincloth. Behind him are two men in black tactical gear: Bulky stab-proof vests over their civilian t-shirts, their black military-grade gas masks pulled below their chin or above their face, their riot helmets secured at their sides-- They look bewildered and lost compared to the mostly naked youth in the foreground armed by little more than what the biblical David carried when he faced Goliath. Smaller figures, far away and out of focus on the far right are turned towards us, towards the youth, their attention seemingly fixed on him. Dark grey smoke billows in the background, suggesting that this battle has been raging for a while, though a bit of blue-grey sky can be faintly seen above the smoke. ]

Banning vs. not banning are not hallmarks of leftism, rather it's the difference between communities that are making an effort to be inclusive (a hallmark of leftism, btw) versus communities where the mods are so tired and overworked that it's easier to ban people than adapt to the disruptions they may cause (a capitalist reflex that prioritizes being palatable to everyone over being fair to everyone because it's more time-efficient to be blandly palatable and to enforce case-by-case fairness).

So yeah, from a certain point of view, because of the simple fact that you are being tolerated marks Lemmy as a more leftist platform.

Mod here.

We're not looking for accidental photos, as in "I yeeted my phone and accidentally captured A Renaissance™", because those mostly don't exist.

We're looking for well-composed photos that, as the photographer was pursuing a nice photo, also accidentally copied the rules of Renaissance painting, which does sometimes overlap (as a happenstance) with the fundamentals of good photography.

We remove a shitload of photos that are objectively gorgeous and technically astute, but don't look like paintings, so trust me, there's a difference.

Pretty ironic that I gave what I thought was an exhaustive description only for someone to point out that I failed to spot something so obvious in hindsight.

Ah well, that's the price of trying to be specific with descriptions, I could have just said "It's a white horse and lots of people 's hands are up".

I'll append your observation to the text description.

It wasn't the way images uploaded, it was more that kbin's image previews absolutely skullfucked the aspect ratio of anything that wasn't roughly in a 3:4 aspect ratio, making a bunch of deeply touching photos look like goofy funhouse mirrors.

We were like, "Shit.... Is.... Is this on purpose? Are the people behind kbin some kind of weirdos who believe in 3:4 aspect ratio supremacy??" so we thought, "Eh..... Maybe we'd better make a Lemmy too, in case kbin doesn't figure their shit out".

Because, honestly? Our faith in humanity was at an all-time low and we were running out of time before people began leaving reddit for new platforms. Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks, right?

Oh, a simple post couldn't possibly be THAT big, haha .... Oh. Oh fuck.

Yeah, that explains it, I guess lol.

Isn't it weird how if you dig up old news articles of celebrities who have always been in the spotlight, you find headlines like "Jon Voight welcomes baby daughter, names her Angelina" and somehow all of her baby photos, childhood photos, etc. show them as girls "before anyone invented trans people" and absolutely zero evidence that they were ever male?

https://pagesix.com/...

I stole it from Tank Girl first, but I don't think she'd mind.

Me, the one who set up the community, seeing my community here, realizing I'm doing a piss-poor job at publicity: https://i.imgur.com/BZNPOxb.jpg

If someone snaps a photo of a subject in good light, because the photographer instinctively knows what will make a good photo, but the subject is just doing their normal everyday things? We still consider it accidental.

Remember that we're not looking for photos that were accidentally taken, like the camera was yeeted through the air and this was the last photo it captured before it shattered. That's not what Accidental means in our context.

It means a situation that was already happening, but the moment that a photographer caught just happened to resemble a painting from the 14th-16th centuries.

We draw the line at people purposely recreating Renaissance vibes with costumes, or people doing a pose that is heavily associated with certain Renaissance paintings, or elaborate lighting rigs used in professional photo studios made specifically to replicate the lighting in Rembrandt's work (for example).

If the photographer was trying to make the mother and child recreate an exact Renaissance pose, they're doing a terrible job at it, but the overall effect is Renaissance-like.

We setup on Blahaj because when we were trying to setup AccidentalRenaissance, we didn't know we were one letter over the arbitrary 20 letter limit on community names, and there wasn't even an error message for it, so we were pounding our heads against the wall trying to figure out why we couldn't setup anywhere on any server.

And we didn't make a big fuss about who we were either. We were just looking to setup an instance. Just some randos as far as anyone knew. So we asked for help.

The admins of Blahaj personally told us what the problem was and when I asked if it was an absolute limit they said it wasn't, and raised their limit. Just for us. Some random-ass strangers. They changed their server just so someone wouldn't have to shorten their name.

So that's how Blahaj scored AccidentalRenaissance.

Given how many actual Renaissance artists were legitimately, deeply, obsessively queer? Yeah, it fits.

Our reward circuits go off when someone mentions taking a rest.

Bee reward circuits go off for things that we would consider work.

Basically, the whole time they are face-first in a flower slurping up nectar and gathering pollen, the thing going through their tiny brains is "Fuck yeah I needed this".

If you gave a bee the day off the general sentiment would be "What the fuck man, this is bullshit, I demand you let me go and collect nectar right fucking now!"

We feel it's still too soon to make that choice but it's a possibility in the future.

We're not sure if we're in a place where we can really do that. On a technical or a financial level.

Thank you for giving us more info, though.

Mod here.

The thing that would help the most is if people actually, you know, posted stuff?

We haven't flocked back to Reddit, but it's difficult to remember to stop by when almost nothing changes day to day.

That's absolutely uncanny,....

That's big talk from the generation that unironically said "RAWR :3" to each other.

I was there.

Livejournal? Emo? "Lol I'm so Random"? Leet speak?? And we took it SO seriously. Peak "No mom it's not a phase".

We were criiiiiiinge.

I just remembered that brief trend where teenage boys were wetting their pants in order to look more vulnerable and soft, took selfies of themselves looking vaguely ashamed with a giant wet spot, and a lot of girls really seemed to like it??

And even if you weren't peak emo, Elder Millennials were wearing flannel and pretending to be just as jaded as Kurt Cobain because they were sad no one was playing POGs anymore, while Younger Millennials had skunk hair and that "greasy sk8r" look.

So what if Zoomers are embracing "Coastal Grandma" looks and TikTok dances? We can't really point fingers.

Forgive me for not knowing much about bots but.... Why would anyone bother having a bunch of bots subscribe to our Community?