cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40388903

I have a science-fantasy world with intelligent non-anthro animals living in harmony, which I’ve posted some lore about this in the past. Think “communist non-anthro Zootopia with sci-fi technology.” This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and combines my interests in worldbuilding and software. I want to create a fictional social media platform for the animals in my world, and stage fictional threads in the typical Reddit/Lemmy format discussing news and politics taking place within the world. Then post screenshots here with context explaining what is happening. I just thought this might be a more fun way of sharing lore about my world than just the articles themselves, almost like an ARG. I’ll also be able to introduce some of my main narrative characters through their social media presence.

On the technical side of things, I don’t know if I want to compile and spin up a local Lemmy instance at home and actually stage accounts and posts on it. But actually logging in and out of different accounts sounds like way more work than necessary so I could also just take the Lemmy UI and add my own mock thread data to it. Or, I could write my own code for a completely fictional GUI, since I don’t want to just use the default Lemmy UI and break the illusion. The second and third options might be more important if I want to make this an actual ARG and host a website for it, since in that case I don’t actually want people to sign up and post.

I would love some feedback in general on this idea, and maybe gauge interest on if this is something people would like to see.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    Do they have their own inventions?

    Absolutely! Dietary enzyme supplements are an entirely animal creation. Humans don’t need them to go vegan but carnivores like cats, dogs, mustelids, etc do.

    Quantum interfaces marked their surpassing of humanity in technological development. These are devices that can arbitrarily interact with and manipulate quantum systems and in theory can do literally anything.

    They also developed ways of managing their ecosystem now that predation is off the table. Unitist ecosystems are prosperous and balanced because they take great care in managing it beyond just having predators to control prey population.

    What happens to things like the meat industry?

    They were destroyed in the various revolutions that led to species becoming Unitist. The path to unitism for former predators like cats, ironically, is filled with violence and bloodshed as the individuals still determined to continue hunting viciously fought back against the individuals trying to move their species/taxa beyond it.

    Makes sense, I was wondering, wouldn’t the predator groups still be on top in this world due to their more ruthless and competitive nature? Do different groups have their own agendas and motivations for wanting to return to the food chain system of old?

    They are on top of their various Trophist societies, but the Unitists are significantly ahead of them in terms of technology, so they can’t really go on the offensive against them because they’ll get their asses handed to them. Unitists are pacifist and don’t go around looking to start wars, but they’re fully prepared to show anyone who tries to hunt them their full technological prowess.

    Trophism is largely comprised of former apex predatoes like wolves, bears, etc. Not to say there are no Unitist apex predators, though.

    Part of the reason Unitism arose primarily in physically smaller was their need to develop technology to defend themselves from the larger predators. Working together allowed them to develop technology faster, which eventually led to the idea of Unitism.