shinjiikarus

Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.

I remember them from Chrome, which was kind of a thing in Europe back in the day.

Are you actually downloading all the stuff from GoG locally? I hear this argument often and it is a good one in principle. Until you try to backup a large library. Before I got my Steamdeck I bought a lot from GoG as well and set up a script to backup to my NAS a few times a year. My GoG library is considerably smaller than my Steam library (~60 games vs. ~1.000 games) and it is still taking up multiple TBs on my NAS, even though I’m only backing up windows .exes. If GoG would go under suddenly, I don’t think a lot of people will have their library backed up, nor can back up their library fast and sufficiently enough to make a difference. The true utility of Steam and other online platforms may be their storage capacity.

I’m generally too lazy to even download the fitgirl repack of UbiSoft stuff. It is that convenient to not engage with UbiSoft cookie cutter crap at all.

Economists who want to use the platform to discuss economist topics? Why should public figures hide their identity on all their accounts?

Genuine question: where is apple selling ads besides the AppStore and which data are they collecting compared to meta?

I think it is really funny that with all the consolidation talks in the gaming industry, we hear so little rumors about UbiSoft getting bought. Microsoft is on a buying frenzy, SONY gets nervous, EA and Take2 have many multiples of Ubi’s equity, just to name the obvious players. The gaming industry has just been rated as more valuable than each the publishing, music and movie industries. Still UbiSoft seems to be in such a bad spot we don’t constantly hear publicly about a possible future acquisition.

I cannot understand this either: we have an everything app, it’s called our homescreen, why would you use that to launch another one?

I fear even asking … do we eat Teflon? 😣

I don’t think Hogwarts Legacy was designed for PC primarily and it’s full of cursor control on console.

Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They've sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.

Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.

Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.

Yeah, I see your point: I want the best camera on the go, therefore I buy Pro, but then complain about weight. Human nature I suppose 😂