The problem is that Lemmy never hit that critical threshold of users where I can just stop using Reddit.

Like one of my favorite subreddits - gaybros and askgaybros - zero activity on the fediverse, so I’m going back to Reddit for that.

If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.

YouTube has some competitors…

Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.

Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.

Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.

I’m glad they stopped recommending things to me with my history off. I just want to see my subscriptions I don’t want to see what the algorithm thinks I want to see.

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The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.

When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.

Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.

The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?

What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.

Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.

They’re all Chrome for Christ’s sake! Edge? Opera? Brave? They’re the same browser! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

I do appreciate that Firefox exists so that we have a choice to use something that isn’t Chromium and mainly controlled by Google.

But from a business perspective, as Adobe, why would they devote developer time to supporting Firefox? Just to not piss off some nerds that care about that type of shit? What’s that like 1% of the population?

Now that you’re pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?

I’d be willing to bet that 80% of the people that have a very intense emotional reaction to the small town song live in the suburbs less than 20 to 30 minutes away from whatever city they work in.

Actual small towns like that have less than a couple thousand people suck ass. There’s nothing to do there and no jobs and that’s why people leave.

Why would you not be super excited for this?

This literally extends coverage to the entire world. Movies will have to come up with a another excuse then - oh I have no signal.

When you’re hiking that trail in the middle of nowhere and you slip and break your leg you can just point your phone to the sky and get help.

What’s wrong with using Google Podcasts for podcasts or Spotify or the dozens and dozens of other podcast apps?

The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.

Google+ didn’t work because they didn’t push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.

Yes - I’m being serious they didn’t push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn’t inadvertently leak your info.

If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.

Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we’d still have Google Talk. I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.

Facebook doesn’t use e2e.

There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.

Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?

Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?

I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it’s fine.

I couldn’t install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn’t in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don’t know Linux at all so I wasn’t making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.

I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn’t really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it’s seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.

So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what’s the problem?