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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It’s not gonna extinguish the fediverse in the same way nobody leaving reddit joined Mastodon as a replacement. They’re technically compatible, but these are entirely different styles of sites we’re talking about. Lemmy and Kbin are gonna keep on trucking regardless of what happens to the Twitter-likes.

    But they’re definitely going to try and kill Mastodon/similar through social engineering. Everybody’s favorite content creators, organizations, and brands will be on Threads, not Mastodon, and when they lock it down we’ll lose access to them and end up needing a Threads account. I don’t understand why anyone trusts this company won’t try to secure market dominance and then monopolize it. The guy says “we’ll just be right back where we are now,” but this could easily decrease the Mastodon population by pulling away anyone who doesn’t care about federation or open source and just wanted a decent Twitter alternative.


  • Votes are public here, as are moderator actions, so we can actually see everything going on, including empty accounts only used to bot upvote stuff. In addition, not every platform works the same way. Some have upvotes and downvotes, some only have upvotes, some are wonky like kbin where upvotes don’t count toward reputation but boosts do, etc. An upvote isn’t just an upvote like it is on reddit. They also can’t “enshittify” something that users can self-host their own instances of to interact.

    Edit: Also, we’re in the early stages right now, reddit has a decade lead.






  • I think it was the right call overall, but I wish they’d started with C++ from the get-go. The game would probably be out by now and they could be working on things like a mobile port while the long-content starved Minecraft community would have something brand-spanking new to check out and explore.

    But things happen, I’m just excited to see the fruits of their labor in the future.



  • I’ve been playing Yakuza 5 and, as always, I cannot recommend this series enough. There’s a pretty large quality drop-off going from Kiwami 2 to Yakuza 3 Remastered, but at minimum Yakuza 0, Kiwami, and Kiwami 2 are all worth playing 100% and after the hurdle of 3 it gets great again.

    The stories are well-paced crime thrillers, the characters are interesting, the combat manages to feel good without just being another Arkham clone, and the games being set in Japan makes it a fun experience to walk through as someone who doesn’t live there. They’re a blast. Not on sale at the moment, but the Steam Summer Sale starts tomorrow.




  • Make a product, make it good

    I hypothesize that if this worked, Xbox would be outselling right now. From a features standpoint, Xbox has been on the ball for years trying to improve their platform. Backwards compatibility, a cheap 1080p console to go along with their 4K flagship, 1440p support from day one of this generation instead of taking nearly two years to put it in, Xbox Adaptive Controller and Copilot for accessibility, Series X|S having Xbox One controller compatibility, replaceable controller batteries so that slow controller death isn’t an issue, Microsoft Rewards exists to get stuff like Xbox giftcards for just playing games and typing shit into Bing, a fully-featured Chromium-based browser (meaning you can do pretty much anything on there that you could do on a normal browser, like GeForce Now or browser games like this (and yes, it works with the Xbox controller on the console), Gamepass (specifically Ultimate, which comes with hundreds of games on its own, EA Play Basic, a bunch of stuff for Riot Games games, game streaming, “perks” like game DLC, movies, and trials for services, and more point-gaining opportunities for MS Rewards), and on top of all of that, you can pay $20 for developer access and install emulators for pretty much any console Xbox 360 or below.

    On the PlayStation end, they also have a lot of great features, like the DualSense controller (built-in controller microphone is a super nice-to-have, the DualSense haptics are sick as fuck when they get used to the fullest, and they’ve got gyro functionality for console users wanting to play with gyro aim in competitive shooters), the fancy PS+ guides feature, the most high-end VR headset on the market, and I really appreciate them not using a proprietary expansion format that completely fucks people all the way from launch until like a couple of weeks ago when Seagate exclusivity runs out finally, but that’s about where my praise of the platform itself ends (Edit: The monthly PS+ games are also way better than the XBLG games, which is excellent for people who don’t want the Netflix-style subscriptions but do pay the online fee).

    The real value to people seems to come pretty much just from what games are on the platform. So,

    and people pick what they need based on WHAT THEY ACTUALLY NEED.

    they actually are. People just wanna be able to play the cool new games, and Xbox hasn’t had any in a long time. Starfield might actually be the first game since the Xbox One where a large amount of people are pissed off that it’s exclusive to Xbox, whereas PlayStation gets game after game that Xbox gamers would really like to have. Hence, exactly why they bought Bethesda and made Starfield exclusive.


  • Personally, I don’t think there needs to be any indication beyond how hidden the content is. Karma’s goal is to push “good” content up and “bad” content down. Users don’t need to see what’s essentially a like/dislike counter for that to work, and I don’t think it’s conducive to civilized discussion. The fediverse makes votes publicly available information, but that doesn’t stop kneejerk anger-downvoting, it just means people can retaliate easier, which feels good to do, but isn’t healthy.