Endymion_Mallorn

Buy a feature phone in cash at a Dollar General as far away from home as you can feasibly get. Do not interact with any other business in the area. Just buy the phone and leave. Activate it at a public library. Add no contacts. Tell no one that it exists.

See, as a native Windows user, I mostly feel the opposite. I use Linux Mint because it’s almost like Windows, but it’s incredibly frustrating when it’s not. I’m not even much of a gamer (most of my games are FOSS, or run in RetroArch, Vice, or DOSBox-X). I just like being able to instantly find the software I’m looking for. It shouldn’t take an hour to find a Notepad. There needs to be something like Dspeech. I shouldn’t need to search and poke and hope that the software is either in apt or flatpak. So every time I go back to Windows, even the hellscape that is 11, I can get everything done faster than Linux.

This belongs in a conspiracy magazine, not tech.

That’s basically correct, yes. I don’t see the fediverse platform(s) as being “special” compared to others. Sure, there’s political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).

If any of those things change, people will see that they’re not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.

We need to break up Cloudflare.

Can’t get enough of it!

If you think it’s just a matter of “they don’t care”, go ahead and write the code yourself.

There’s one big issue with that: I don’t care enough either. It’s not a priority for me.

Then all the Fediverse is, is just a bump in the road for Reddit and Twitter.

If the devs care about that part of the software (or any dev who’s got the time and interest since it’s open-source), they would be working on it. They’ve signalled to users that they don’t care. Let those who care do it. And if no one cares, then it doesn’t need to be done.

Fair point about his actions, and I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us. I disagree strongly about everyone paying. We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community. We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit. Money shouldn’t need to change hands.

See, I get your point on PeerTube, but I counter with the fact that we did have video online before YouTube. That wasn’t the revolution. It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut. Same with streaming before ryan.tv. Before it was free, it was extremely niche. When monetary investment stopped being needed, it hit the mainstream. If the monetization of video content comes directly from viewers, you will go back to dedicated hobbyists and those who are certain that videos will be funded in advance.

The reason they can’t show ads is actually pretty simple: if I’m going to have ads in my feed, I’m just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you’re going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn’t care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed’ing from the ad-ridden instance.

For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.

No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn’t have to care anymore.

We’re all mad here …

If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.

Most people don’t want to self host. And most people aren’t willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?

Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It’s a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn’t sustainable. I say it’s a cycle. The specific instances don’t matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there’s at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.

Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can’t approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren’t expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they’ll drop off social media altogether.

We’ve already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a ‘donation’ if you prefer, but if you’re gating an action behind money, that’s a fee), or simply don’t allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it’s free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.

It’s not Doom scrolling until you decide to rip and tear, until it is done.

I mean, that 2600 Chess was built from the ground up to play a good game of chess with variable difficulty levels. I bet there’s days or games when Fischer couldn’t have beaten it. Just because a thing is old and less capable than the modern world does not mean it’s bad.

JOSHUA

We’re going to have to settle for disagreeing on this. I just want a place to get stable abandonware, not a misstep into another place begging to take real money for digital data.

And I would assume so, since I’m not a YouTuber.

Oh hell no. Valve are evil, like any other corporate monstrosity. It’s not that I want GOG to “stay in their lane” as a bad thing. I want them to stay away from the morasse of crap that other sites like them have become. There are game modding communities all over the Internet, we don’t need an abandonware site that put on airs to become part of the “modern marketplace”.

I want GOG to getback to what it was before CDPR.