It’s in the “Blocked Instances” section, where it should be.

sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397

It is odd that threads.net appears on our instances page, while the same is not true for other Lemmy instances which have not blocked Threads. Lemmy.world is federated with Threads by default simply because it is not on our instance block list. I do not believe our instance has done anything special to force a link with Threads. I mentioned it in our admin chat and will update this post if I learn anything.

However, even with threads.net listed on our instances page, Threads does not seem to work with Lemmy. I am able to search and view Mastodon user profiles from lemmy.world, but it does not work for any of the Threads test profiles.

Edit: The lemmy.world database has no records for a person on threads.net. Our best guess is that a Threads user tried to interact with lemmy.world. Perhaps the process got far enough for our instance to recognize threads.net and add it to our instances list, but not far enough to create a record of the user in our DB.

Spoiler alert: the drain is just a straight pipe to a bucket below the counter.

In my opinion the community is intended for real-world maps. Communities like [email protected] and [email protected] might be a better fit for fantasy maps.

Though I don’t mean to be a heavy-handed dictator. If you have something to share that you think the community might like, go ahead and post it. We’ll see what people think via the comments and votes. If people here want to see fantasy maps then that’s fine with me.

The research paper doesn’t get into that detail in their definition of “lake,” but the authors do seem okay with including lakes that occasionally dry up. They mention in the paper that, “Lake Victoria, presently the world’s largest tropical lake, desiccated during the late Pleistocene (Stager et al. 2011).”

Regions like Persia, China, and the eastern Mediterranean got a head start because their climate, plants, and animals allowed agriculture to begin. Agriculture allowed major cultural developments: written text, math, astronomy, etc. These things then slowly spread to Europe via trade and wars of conquest.

Europe took all this imported knowledge and added another detail: developing better weapons and militaries. Wars happen everywhere, but Europe took it to a new level with centuries of near-constant fighting. This created big incentives to develop better weapons, better tactics, to travel and trade to find new resources, etc. All that military development led to improvements in metallurgy, shipbuilding, ocean navigation, etc. They leapfrogged all the cultures that came before them.

Why does it start in Europe?

You should read Guns, Germs, and Steel. The author argues that humans in certain regions of the world benefitted from particular environmental factors: better climate, better geography for trade, the availability of plants and animals that will tolerate being domesticated, etc. Many small advantages combine over centuries to create huge differences in technological advancement.

I empathize with your situation. I’m in the same boat. Even with hundreds of subscribers, if everyone’s lurking then the community gets stale and withers. Becoming a one-person content machine isn’t sustainable.

Though on a brighter note, with this post you just gained a subscriber to your community. Browsing through it reminded me of how fun geocaching was. I just dusted off my old geocaching.com account from a decade ago. I’ll have to take my kids out and see what we can find!