Oh, yeah, the big studios have definitely taken notice for years now. Many of them seem to have incorporated it into their workflows too. The future definitely looks bright. I made a post on blenderartists years ago saying that Blender, due to its free/open-source nature, would knock all competitors down one by one, starting with the smallest, and I think it keeps proving true.

Someone replied to a similar complaint that you can block the meme and shitpost communities to filter those out from your feed. Seems like a good idea and I’m going to try it.

Good point. I think the sorting algorithms should be the number one priority for Lemmy devs at the moment.

Great! You’re welcome. Good luck with your research and discovery process.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of creativity

• Orson Welles, I believe

Be kinder than necessary, for everyone is fighting some kind of battle.

Well, I would say first, don’t be afraid that you’ll pick the wrong thing. Keep an open mind and research and try different things. Like some others have said, generally avoid the idea of picking something you love, unless that is something that has a good demand/supply ratio of workers. Otherwise you’ll be competing with other people who love the same thing, in a race to the bottom in terms of both money and work conditions.

Here are a few things that could help:

There are probably many online articles and websites that provide additional/updated ideas and resources.

Your local public library should have a section with books on the topic of choosing a career. Ask your librarian for help.

If you’re still in high school, find out if they offer aptitude testing and other career counseling. If not, check your local community college to find out if they do. Another option that’s less accessible (price and distance) but that you may find worthwhile is the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (https://www.jocrf.org/)

Disclaimer: some of this advice is a little United-States focused, but you should be able to generalize it to many other countries.

Has Blender become industry standard yet? Last time I looked (a couple of years ago?) the big commercial ones, at least Maya and Houdini, were still the industry standard. Not to take anything away from Blender though. It’s an amazing piece of software, gaining ground quickly, and would be my choice for doing 3D. However, I’m not in industry, and I had read back then from industry folks that Blender was still lacking in some areas. Some of it may have just been inertia on the part of large organizations that used the commercial software though.

You can bypass the need for #2. See my other, longer post in this thread. You can find any community you want and make your instance aware of it (as long as the host instance is not defederated, I presume). No need to depend on others searching.

After I subscribed to a bunch of communities what I ended up selecting as my defaults are “subscribed” and “hot”. This seems to most closely replicate the experience from old.reddit when I was signed in. However, I noticed and also read that there’s a bug with the Hot code that shows old posts, so I end up using “new” a lot too. Sometimes I even rotate through top or top and all, to find different stuff.

Haha, thanks!

You’re welcome!

I tried searching a Titanic sub on my UK instance, and it didn’t show up. But it was deffo still there on my L.W search? What?

Ah, I learned that there’s a trick to this specific situation. If a community hasn’t been subscribed to by anyone on your instance yet, it will not show up in results when you first search for it (search by URL or !link by the way). However, wait a few seconds and hit search again - the community will now show up and you can subscribe to it! What apparently happens is that your server is not yet aware of that community, but once you search for it with a URL or !link, your server will immediately search it out and become aware of it. This is why it’s usually better to search for communities on one of the big Fediverse directory sites, especially if you’re on an instance with fewer people in it. My favorite site for this at the moment is https://lemmyverse.net/communities - it will show both the URL and !link right there and allow you to easily copy it to search on your instance.