After playing through a few times, my advice is to embrace manifold layouts because they are easy to set up and even easier to expand (especially with blueprints). Pick a recipe to work on, and for each ingredient dedicate a line of producers to it. Do the same for the next ingredient, etc.

The key to this is that if (when) you need to extend your production of the goal recipe, all you need to do is add on to each line proportionally. Thus, you can set this up fairly early and just expand on it as you progress.

Note that you do absolutely end up making many lines of, say, iron plates and other early products; the goal isn't to have only one line of each item, but rather to dedicate expandable lines to specific individual items (sometimes redundantly).

Also, the early belts do limit you and it certainly makes more sense to use load balancing rather than manifolds at that point, but you also don't need to wait until the final tier of belts to start using manifolds.

Some good points by the author, especially around us likely being in a state of flux in the social aspect of the Internet.

One thing that I don't agree with is that lemmy and other fediverse options have "a long way to go" to shore up the onboarding process. Sure, the concept of the fediverse is fairly unfamiliar to people. And yes it's currently a little clunky to sign up...

But with some honestly pretty minor handholding added to the onboarding process, and some nice polish, people would have no problem picking an instance and signing up; "tell us your interests and we'll show you some home bases for you to pick from." And then boom, they're in!

Default to "all" rather than "local", and people will be able to ease in to this new experience without too much delta from what they're used to--and people can onboard without ever needing to learn about the unfamiliar fediverse concept. They can learn that on their own time, after finding content and a community that speaks to them.

At least in my experience (which is admittedly limited in the fediverse at this point), it seems to be that the concept that lemmy is hard to onboard is because we're trying to teach people about the underlying tech during the onboarding process rather than helping people get through the door to a familiar experience.