This is similar to a “Minecraft layer” I added to my last split ergo keyboard. I got all the keys I needed on to the left half. I did it by making a second row of numbers across the top and moving the other rows down. Seeing the number pad on the right here makes me wonder if I should try that design instead.

I have accounts on both, and I like the look of kbin better, so I’ve tried to use it more. However, the functionality you mention has been undiscoverable to me: I have no idea how to get a list of non-local magazines, and I’ve looked around for that quite a bit. On lemmy, it’s as easy as clicking “All” when searching communities.

Is there any document that would help me find those features on kbin? Or, for that matter, a similar sort of documentation for lemmy?

Wow, you’re right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their “communities”) weren’t tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.

I’ve been really happy with Ayu Owl

Yeah, yeah, it’s Chinese government propaganda, but isn’t all advertisement basically propaganda? “Everything is rosy in Xinjiang” is a harmful lie, but so is “if you buy a big-ass truck you’ll be a manly man” and frankly I think the latter is causing a lot more damage because it’s one that people act on.

My mapping is encoder: scroll wheel ctrl+encoder: horizontal scroll layer shift+encoder: switch desktops

I’ve seen the rebranded site written as “Xitter”. Note that in the modern system for transliterating Chinese, the letter x makes the “sh” sound (e.g. the Chinese word for thank you is rendered “xie xie”). I think these two facts go together nicely.

Taken without credit from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. This is a book, but more interesting is the collection of video essays on the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@obscuresorrows .

The Model 100 is my next installment. Spoiler alert: I didn’t like it.

The biggest problem with getting the second part out is that I’ll have to clean my desk to get a good picture of the keyboard. Ugh.

If you’re typing in alt codes, it sounds like you would definitely benefit from a keyboard where you could program those to keys, whether or not it was ergonomic. I wrote about customizing qmk with programming to meet my needs, but I’m a programmer-- there are also GUI configuration tools that might suit you better. Most (all?) qmk keyboards can be configured with a GUI tool called VIA.