Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.

As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium’s developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google’s whimsy.

Pragmatically it doesn’t matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.

For the time being the bot account flag is voluntary anyway, so there’s nothing stopping a repost bot from not indicating they are one.

Block and move on is the most straightforward solution at the moment.

I do not as this is not my expertise. In general though, reaching out to specialty academic/medical units are usually a great first step for pursuing something particularly esoteric.

Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it’s not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn’t ideal.

If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

This comment isn’t to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.

Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.

Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.

Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.

As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).

At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.

BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.

Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.

From my PoV:

1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it’s very easy to consume content
2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there’s a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it’s a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That’s understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

The generic stuff that has a broad common denominator will easily take hold on Lemmy as they would in any growing community (like shitposts, question threads, gaming, technology, news, image focused communities and so on).

The niche stuff will take a while to grow, more so as the niche subs are those less likely to move from Reddit (or already have communities like Discord that they retreat to). More specific communities will need to build a new base here unfortunately.

Time will tell; it’s not been that long.

Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

• Ads
• Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
• Obtrusive Ads
• Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
• Ads masquerading as real submissions
• Paid promotions

Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.

In many cases it’s a numbers game. Not a bad idea to connect with old colleagues or acquaintances, or to network with current or recent ones.

The unfortunate reality is the job market is kind of awful right now, insofar as the experience is for someone looking, so you run better odds leveraging who you know.

Specialized job boards are particularly great places to target (for example, postings at large public or private institutions nearby instead of generic job boards).

Any big major for profit company embracing federation is purely for their own revenue generating goals and have no explicit want to be actually good stewards of the Internet, its communities, and about their participation.

Participating in Federation is another way for Meta to suck up as much data as it can to sell its advertising services.

Exactly! There is absolutely nothing wrong for both third-party developers using Reddit and Reddit itself to be profitable. However, Reddit’s leadership has decided this absolutely cannot fly.

There’s general broad agreement that if Reddit wants to charge for API access, that’s fine, but the prices and timelines are absolutely not practical for any third-party developer. All existing third-party applications today get by because of an exemption (signed under NDA). The fact that Narwhal’s developer has not divulged the specifics of the agreement and has generally pussy-footed around it when asked speaks volumes about Reddit’s “transparency”.

There were so many ways to monetize this out of the users directly instead of going after third-party developers; instead Reddit decided that the third-party developers were a direct enemy and competitor, rather than a value-added component of their platform. It’s absolutely stupid.

Reddit has been making promises and punting the action down the line for years.

So much of their work is half baked and incomplete, or just not fully featured, and usually only sufficient to be a minimally viable product

Anyone who sincerely trusts Reddit in this way is just asking for trouble.

Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.

Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.

Being “open source” seems to be lead people to think it is altruistic or good for the community as a whole.

Being open source is really just a categorization. A fully for profit organization can make something valuable open source and then leverage that for commercial reasons (like building highly monetized additional code on top).

It is in Google’s best interests for Chromium to dominate the web even if it is open source due to Chrome’s broad reach and Google’s heavy leverage of the web for revenue, like its ad services.

It is shortsighted to see what is happening and then go “well I don’t see a problem”.

macOS has had free upgrades since OS X Mavericks in 2013. Yea we can squirrel around the specificity of this (e.g. is it really free if you have to pay $99 to update Parallels?) but in pragmatic terms the actual OS has largely been free for consumer use.

I generally get the idea being communicated, but its content is so out of date at this point.

In addition to the Octopath mention, the Xenoblade Chronicles games have some absolutely stellar soundtracks.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has a night theme and day theme for each individual large area, and there are a lot of them, alongside a variety of battle music, insert tracks, and more. Each of the night/day themes share overlapping motifs, alongside motifs reflective of the larger music work as a whole.