I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don’t have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn’t done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn’t anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn’t support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn’t seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I’m going to buy a game and hope it’s going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it’s Steam from me.

I agree. I’m tired of always blaming the end users for everything

Yeah :( I love my 2017-2018 phone to death (it’s a Pixel 2 XL, and in the ~€400 phone market they are still trying to beat its camera quality 6 years later - and since it’s a Pixel it’s still more fluid than several phones I try in store, like €400-500 Samsungs, that display evident stutters that mine does not), but it has started with the random crashes and “dying” (boot loops followed by not turning on anymore) for a few minutes / hours before coming back to its senses occasionally

Like the entire fediverse, I also feel like it’s much easier to reach other people here. What you write actually gets read. On Reddit, you either piggy back off one of the top comments, comment on a thread within minutes from it being posted or you are basically shouting into the void

It was at 7/10 because the iPhone 14 introduced a repair-friendly design that made it, in theory, easier to repair than most competing high-end smartphones. However, the fact that there is a software DRM on the parts you install makes this repairable design completely useless for the end user, it just makes repairs cheaper for Apple themselves, thus adding insult to injury.

That about wraps it up

Unity was “cancelled” the very second they introduced this fee. Nobody wants or will ever want to publish their game in Unity anymore. Studios planning to develop a game in Unity have already decided on moving to Unreal as we speak.

Unity is now irrelevant, and a product to recommend against. Unity is legacy software to abandon. If this doesn’t mean it’s cancelled I don’t know what does.

Mobile developer here. Somewhat. I’ve written mobile apps for my internship and I have some several hundred hours of experience.

This is because Apple provides a much better SDK and, most importantly, the fact that all the iOS devices actually get updated means you are not stuck needing to support ancient SDK versions and you can freely rely on newer methods more easily

Though my personal phone is Android. I see the difference in polish between most iOS and most Android apps, but I think that’s an objective difference but a subjective trait. For now I still prefer Android: while everything is still a little more rough around the edges the gap has been slowly closing for s few years now, Material You is finally really good, and gone are the days of the fiddly Android phones that never worked quite right or needed the occasional trip to recovery mode to wipe /cache to stay fast or the occasional factory reset: modern Android is much different, it’s basically fully immutable in a way where every action is completely reversible, and it does a much better job at maintaining itself than it used to in the past.

Still yes, for people who value the slightly higher polish on native iOS apps, being able to sideload as well is big. It would make me at least consider the iPhone. A lot of the apps I use every day come from F-Droid, and F-Droid is where I look for my apps first when I need something to fulfill a certain purpose. I’m pretty big on FOSS, but I’ve never been able to truly commit on my phone yet as it’s not really ready for my use case yet (mostly, weird bugs and missing features in MicroG). So it’s not FOSS Vs Apple - it’s Google vs Apple in my case, so neither is an ethical choice.

Twitter as well. Two of the major social media platforms fucking up this badly roughly at the same time was nothing I would have ever bet any amount of money on, and the best advertising the fediverse could ask for.

Uni! We were just friends, though very good friends. But still firmly just friends, she was actually in a relationship for a good part of our friendship and I had zero interest in going beyond good friends with her in particular, and I especially knew better than fall for a person in a relationship - I’ve never seen one of these end well. I haven’t been interested in dating for most of my life. But I think that’s because my social life and self esteem has been seriously eeh in middle and high school, while I started really working on a social life in uni. Before jumping to dating I wanted to get a few basics down - a good friend group (ended up being several of them!), a real social life and some 1:1 close friends. Plus my own personal world of hobbies, ambitions and interests. You know - a good world to introduce a person to. At one point, I was feeling finally ready for a relationship and excited to try and accept this possible direction in life. I started acting as someone who’s interested in dating: worked on my appearance and self esteem, got more social and made it a point to socialize with everybody at events. That friend I mentioned earlier actually was on a small personal “Do not date” blacklist, because I didn’t want to ruin our friendship (read: be rejected and see the other person go cold on you until you lose them completely… I had already made that mistake) and she was the person with whom I naturally vibed the absolute best - it was effortless. Who wants to lose the effortoess friend who doesn’t drain their social battery at all?

I guess it was so effortless that when it was supposed to happen it happened, things happened, our friendship was starting to develop in a “dangerous” direction (which was making me feel wary to be fair because I was definitely starting to catch feelings), then at one point she made a move and it felt like an impossible dream come true, like the best case scenario that was so good I was not even considering it as a valid option coming to life. Easily one of the happiest moments of my life. And the rest is history.

I’ve read enough horror stories about this that I have started eating out much less. With friends or partner to have fun sure, I don’t want to give up or reduce my social life (even then I try to pick “safe” food, and definitely cooked food), but unless I am like super tired or really didn’t have a second to go buy groceries, I will cook my own food and not order take-away any day of the week. At least I trust what I am cooking.

The overnight ones are those that I deem worth it. A night spent in confort and living the day after with some restful sleep behind is totally worth it, if it’s an occasional thing.

I’m 24 and a lot of people in my friend circle are definitely using it. I’d say it started off niche but it’s becoming mainstream.

It’s the only social network I don’t hate right now

Is it? Don’t like to play devil’s advocate but I’m pretty sure my Instagram is pretty much alive and my BeReal feed is an at all all-time high, with several new joins lately too.

I agree that it’s much worse, that on anything that isn’t BeReal it’s harder to find your friends posts, that the ads got way too many - but at least here people are absolutely not stopping to create content for them.

I hate Google as much as the next guy but I don’t think switching to the product of an even more capitalistic company, one that is completely locked down and doesn’t allow you to install your own OS, is actually a good solution…

To be fair, community’s beloved repairable and sustainable Fairphone doesn’t have one either…

Huge +1 on this. Much more aligned to the philosophy of the Fediverse not to rely on a centralised service for announcements

You get it. This is why Reddit isn’t going anywhere and people are just downloading the official App or patching Infinity or Sync with ReVanced Manager. I’m an advanced user, FOSS advocate, die-hard Linux user and one that gets 90% of their mobile apps through F-Droid. I love the idea of the Fediverse, but I am struggling to use it for my own needs without all the defederation stuff getting in the way and becoming very hard to get around. If someone like me is having problems, then it absolutely isn’t ready for prime time.

In fact, I still use Reddit through a patched 3P client because my non-techie and non-political communities aren’t moving at all. As an example of something more mainstream: I’m a heavy Stardew Valley player. The Stardew community on Lemmy is dead, but on Reddit it’s very much alive and new posts gets thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments daily. What seems to be alive here is the kind of content tech-savvy people are more likely to consume: tech, politics, news, that’s it.

It reminds me of the Linux desktop back in 2017. It was promising and it was beginning to get more interest and traction, but still when you tried using it was eh. Almost there. But not quite there. My laptop would boot and run my Firefox and development tools fine, but then the audio codec would die and display “Dummy output” until I rebooted (in the best case, I had to reinstall Ubuntu in 2 cases where audio permanently died), or my Bluetooth earbuds would stop working properly or at all seemingly at random, and when I woke my laptop up from sleep there was a 1/5 chance that GDM would hard lock and force to me to SIGKILL my entire GNOME session if not SysRQ reboot to gain back control - and this was on Ubuntu-certified SKU running a certified ISO in a state that I had left so default desperate to see it working properly that I had not even changed the default wallpaper. There would always be something a touch too inconvenient. For me, it was audio and sleep not working properly. So you would eventually image your laptop back to Windows and go with it, while knowing in the back of your mind you shouldn’t, but you want to actually get stuff done and play your games, which actually launch without Wine crashes or GPU driver errors - this is how I feel using Reddit now. Linux has matured way past this point and it can now act as a main system no problem and be a reliable performer with a scope that covers 90% of use cases well, the dream was achieved. I hope the Fediverse will follow a similar curve with time, but after months of trying the Fediverse out a way or another it still can’t stop reminding me of that older stage of Linux: promising and growing - but not quite there, and unreasonable to use exclusively.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that you can always switch instances or make an alt account.

Exactly. I’m deciding between these two - I am not impressed at all on how this was handled, and I have already decided that I am not going to be loyal to this instance. Half contemplating migrating everything and screwing off honestly, but I am scared of my new smaller home instance disappearing into the void, bringing my entire account with it, which is why I chose lemmy.world. to begin with. Is that a thing that might happen?

Interesting. I wonder if it can run on my Raspberry Pi 3b+, or if the single GB of RAM doesn’t cut it, it will be up in my list of things to do together with immich, grocy, paperless-ng and NextCloud when I manage to build my real homelab. I’ve read enough horror stories about smaller instances disappearing so this seems like a good way forward?

Even then, I can’t say this is intuitive. I’m an advanced Linux user with sysadmin skills. I can pull this off in a few hours, but I doubt it’s the same for average Joe…

Fair point, but it seems absurd to me that a supposedly community-based instance gets harsher on privacy than a corporation that’s about to IPO. That seems off to me. Then again: lack of a big legal team. Understandable. Sad, inconvenient, but understandable. I’m not mad, I’m just sad. Mostly because this legal war on piracy is not only on piracy, but on software freedom (DRM, WEI, etc) and privacy (for a lot of media, there is no privacy-respecting way to legally acquire it)

Another thing that seems off is that this announcement has been made on the Discord server. Now, I don’t want to come across as that guy. I admit I use Discord regularly, because that’s what my friends are on and all efforts to migrate them to something more privacy-respective have been futile, mostly due to the lack of fleshed-out and comparable alternatives for now. But… why should a Fediverse instance have an official server on Discord? I feel like it kinda goes against the whole philosophy of this entire thing. Then again I’m new, so I might be in the wrong here. But wouldn’t a Matrix server or something be a better fit for this sort of thing?