deweydecibel

To offer the counterpoint:

Local and private communities, if they remain only for meta content, is fine. But if they are used for other content, because they don’t want other instances seeing or interacting with it, it can permit an instance to isolate itself and its content from the rest of the fediverse, while still being able to enjoy all the shared content from other instances. I.e. show me yours, but I won’t show you mine.

Then, if these local only communities are the only places where people on that instance are sharing certain content, it’s breaking the whole idea that it shouldn’t matter what instance you’re on. If instances can remain insular, it starts making more instances attractive based on their size. “If you want to enjoy this content, come join our instance.”

Also safer spaces for groups targeted by bigots

Then they need to ban the bigots. Why should only the people on that instance have access to the safe space? Why is someone from another instance instantly judged as making the safe space less safe? It’s basically saying “come join our instance”, which is, again, going to cause unintended consequences.

I bought Remake on launch day. Haven’t bought Rebirth yet. Not because I’m not interested, I’m very excited for it. It was mostly just because I don’t have a PlayStation 5 yet. And money’s been pretty tight for the last year or so.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

It doesn’t even just have to be about money, Valve is one of the only major tech companies I can think of that seems to actually care about customer feedback. They don’t acquiesce to every request and complaint, it’s unrealistic to expect any company to do that, but just in general, Valve genuinely seems to listen more on the whole.

Too many tech companies have convinced themselves that the silent majority’s silence equals approval, and therefore the “vocal minority” of complaints need never be taken seriously. But what they don’t appreciate is the most vocal criticisms tend to come from enthusiasts, and when you cater to the average users only, you are slowly making your product less remarkable.

Steamdeck feels like a product made for that “vocal minority”. It addresses so many concerns that other tech companies would hand wave away because “most people aren’t complaining”.

It’d be cool if, ya know, digital releases came with transferable, irrevocable licenses, and the freedom to create your own physical backups for your games without needing to “check in”.

But we won’t get that. We’ll never even get close to that.

So in lieu of that, we have to stick with the discs, because that’s the last distribution method where there were proper consumer protections in place.

We’re stuck with this dated format and it’s low storage space because these businesses have utterly refused to provide us the same benefits in the digital space as we got from the discs, and the trade-off for the convenience is unacceptable.

They also painted a gigantic red target on their back with that.

The legal arguments against piracy are related to loss of potential income, but that’s hard to prove.

Except when you accept donations and they can point to it directly. When the donations spiked around the time of the Tears of the Kingdom leak, Nintendo’s lawyers probably got very excited.

I’m not saying the devs for emulators can’t or should never accept donations, but you have got to be smarter about this.

I feel like that has been the case but lately there have been more proper next-gen exclusives that even I, who drags my feet on next gen consoles, am putting aside some cash for PS5. Up until now I didn’t feel the need, but between Spiderman and FF7, I think it’s time.

I feel like I reached that point much earlier in the last console generations than I did in this one. Maybe that has to do with the speed of development being so much slower nowadays.

It’s pretty obvious they don’t like the moderation. They linked the modlog showing what they removed. Comments had been removed by someone other than him. They didn’t care for it

And just in general, Microsoft will enshitify GitHub one day. Its inevitable for every free service run by a public for-profit corporation. You can count on this as much as you can count on climate change.

So why wait until it starts happening? Get started with the move now.

That’s a strange read on Reddit. I’ve heard people say this before, and it’s baffling.

Reddit is, and always has been, a link aggregator first and foremost. Of course it’s reposts and screenshots of others sites. That’s kind of the point. To bring you Twitter so you don’t have to actually be on twitter.

Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.

Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn’t shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.

And that’s why these companies and their devs don’t listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?

I’m just curious what you thought might have happened to Snapchat? What app took its place in your estimation?

You don’t have to care. No one does. No one is blocking this from working.

It’s just not being listed on Nexus.

Moreover this mod wasn’t giving options to players to choose how they wanted to play, it was changing very specific things and advertising it. Nexus doesn’t care to let them use their platform to advertise a mod made for a very specific audience of really shitty people.

I don’t see how this is any different than when straight characters in a game hit on you and you have to reject them. Why does the sexuality or gender of the person change anything when it comes to rejection? You’re either into them or you aren’t. Make a mod that eliminates awkward rejection moments across the board.

It’s a matter of targeting. There are ways to address the change you’d like to see that aren’t this focused, give granular control, and permit players to form an experience of their own. It’s not just about the mod they made, it’s about the mod they could have made but didn’t, and that reveals a prejudice.

The news is more that the mod existed. And it may not be particularly shocking news but it’s still notable when people put this much work into hate.

In other words, there’s “let people mod whatever they like” and there’s mods that are effectively a statement of an ethos, and not all ethos are worth letting your platform be used to broadcast.

There’s also mods that are tools to give players more freedom, and mods that are fixes to correct what the dev sees as mistakes or shortcomings. The difference between “choose what color you want the flags to be” and “the flags are all blue now”. The latter is a statement of a belief: “I think the game would be better if all the flags were blue”.

The changes in this mod could be framed differently, like “gives player more granular control over NPC gender and sexuality”. It could have been done in a respectful and open-ended fashion that doesn’t play on harmful stereotypes. It could even be used to make the game “more gay” if the player chooses, then if some players choose to make it all “less gay”, so be it. That would be fine.

But that’s not what this mod is, and the intent behind it is fairly obvious. There’s no reason to pussyfoot around this one with arguments about player freedom, that wasn’t why it was made.

Plex, to it’s credit, does make streaming externally from the home network easier. Setting that up with Jellyfin is a little more involved, but it’s also free, whereas Plex will make you pay for that. But if you have no desire to stream outside the home, it’s not an issue.

Jellyfin apps on other platforms are a bit of crab shoot. Some are maintained very well, some (like the Android TV version) have fewer mainteners and go a long time without updates or fixes. For most users, they’re perfectly adequate, but it’s something to be aware of.

Plex’s app support on various platforms is better, but much less controllable and customizable. That goes for the main UI as well. It’s polished but you’re stuck with whatever Plex decides to put there. You can customize Jellyfin much more, strip out things you don’t want, etc. You can apply custom CSS, too.

Plex is a business, and therefore it has things it wants you to see whether you like it or not. The enshitification of its UI will get worse overtime, as happens to all for-profit tech company products, but for the time being it’s tolerable. Just don’t get too comfy.

Overall I’d suggest Jellyfin for most in-home use cases, and if you’re comfortable managing external connections (and the security of it). If don’t have the time or knowledge to manage this beyond powering it on, open the wallet and go with Plex. But there’s no reason to pay a subscription for something your home equipment and your Internet connection are all doing on their own if you can spare a little time to set it up.

The commenter didn’t bother to ask what OP’s familiarity with any of this was, just said “build a thing”.

Not everyone that wants to start self-hosting needs to start building shit from day 1. Training wheels are ok.

Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can’t be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.

I don’t like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn’t Mozilla, it’s the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.

What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.

They need money. That’s it. That’s the long and short of it.

The bottom line is, they started something that’s bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.

I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.

After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it’s own without the creator’s direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.

That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.