It's a meme. I had to look it up the other day since I had no idea either.

Obligatory shoutout to !anime@ani.social if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven't really watched much western animation in recent years.

• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End - !frieren@ani.social
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
• Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven't watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2's animation (despite the studio's working conditions)
• Demon Slayer - another show I haven't watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips

Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.

Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• !anime@ani.social
• !manga@ani.social
• !lightnovels@ani.social

Series-Specific Communities

• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon community
• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End community
• !nokotan@ani.social - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• !dandadan@ani.social - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• !dragonball@ani.social - Dragonball community

Misc.

• !vocaloid@ani.social - Very new community just started by @hisao@ani.social about vocaloids. Check it out!
• !vtubervids@ani.social - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• !nokotan@ani.social - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• !dandadan@ani.social - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• !frieren@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people's lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

As somebody that doesn't really follow VTubers at all, I thought this was going to be about Oshi no Ko based on the title.

These are homophones in Japanese. Same thing as words like their/there/they're or seas/sees/seize, etc. Words that sound the same but are written differently. The Japanese language has tons of them. Often, the ambiguity around homophones is used as a source of humor, causing misunderstandings between characters in anime/manga or puns that add a layer of humor to an otherwise normal thing to say.

The apps are a good point. The image does display correctly in an Android browser, but doesn't load in any of the apps that I have installed.

So, I don't really have a strong opinion here, but I suspect there might be issues with certain things (like gifs) due to the lack of avif motion support in iOS browsers (based on caniuse). I don't have the means to test this though.

At the half:

I tuned in about 10 minutes through the half once I grabbed some lunch. I have been watching France play through this tournament and they haven't seemed like they particularly found their groove yet. At least, they seem a pale imitation of the French team that showed up in the World Cup. I had thought it was maybe due to Mbappe being sidelined so far. However, with him on the pitch this game, they have largely struggled to break through the Polish defense (until the last ~5 minutes or so).

There just hasn't been too much movement off the ball for France, creating space for their play makers to work through the Polish defense. France has looked better on the fast break than when they try to build it up because they have struggled to get through the back line of Poland after they get their lines set up. There were a couple minutes there at the end of the half where France started playing some quick give and go's and were able to spring some players behind the back line to make the Polish goalkeeper come up with some good reflex saves.

As for Poland, I think they should be fairly happy with their performance so far. They have mostly managed to contain some of the French play makers while having a couple good looks at goal on the break. Something to watch out for, and they almost got caught out, is that they don't over commit forward and have things turn into a footrace toward their own goal after a turnover.

The French team of the last five minutes of the half looked way better than the rest of what I watched, so I think they should look to emulate those quick passes and through balls to try to break through Poland as their big, lofted crosses haven't had shown too much promise yet.

Happy birthday ani.social! Thanks for putting the effort into keeping the lights on as the community here has grown.

Ani.Social was supposed to be a KBin instance

That bit of serendipity worked out in your favor. My understanding is that kbin development has essentially stopped because of health issues with the dev. The mbin project has essentially taken up the reins as a successor still under active development.

Automatic moderation tools

These sound interesting, however these are admin-level tools rather than community-level. I have been saying for ages that lemmy needs more tools built in to help community moderators, but I am hopeful that they might be coming. Someday. Maybe. Hopefully? I know that sublinks is focusing a lot on this, but I haven't heard as much from the lemmy devs.

I host an instance of lemmy I use for testing, so I took a quick look through the documentation for these tools to maybe install and play around with them, but I think these might be a step beyond what I want to put the effort into getting set up. Thanks for the work that you do on this front. I wonder how the image filtering tool is going to deal with drawn content. The false positive rate might differ a lot compared to what is typical.