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·
    2 days ago

    Does this happen in reverse too? Where a unitist country becomes way too in the other direction which leads to a backlash?

    It certainly can, but it has never happened so far, because interspecies cooperation is so beneficial to everyone that once animals get used to it the case to throw it all away is pretty weak. There are instances of neutral territories being overthrown by Trophists though.

    So in practice what does this look like? How about for animals which live in polar opposite climates?

    Even animals in polar opposite climates can generally do fine with short periods of time outside, with some thick clothing or evaporative cooling (spraying water on your fur and letting it evaporate). They would probably prefer a remote job that lets them stay home most of the time, and cities are designed such that they rarely have to walk very far to do their errands. But just as humans who choose to live in challenging environments, if you really want to live somewhere you can make it work.

    Also, how do land animals travel to different territories in this world?

    They have well developed public transit networks based on hovercrafts that connect different Unitist regions, scaling from Air Rapid Transit around a city, to inter-city, to inter-territory, to inter-continent. You can also pretty seamlessly transfer between long and short distance hovercraft networks, so you can basically fly to any destination with a few connections, often for free.