• 7 Posts
  • 188 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 6th, 2024

help-circle
  • Well, that’s fair enough, I guess.

    I think the difference between servers and what it means to be on one server vs another is not exactly obvious. On the other hand, if picking a Mastodon or Lemmy server gives a person choice paralysis, I don’t know how they can pick anything in life without getting choice paralysis.

    Like, how do you know which bread to buy? I guess you just arbitrarily pick one and if you like it then just stick with it, and if you don’t then you try something else.

    But listen, I’m no stranger to overthinking things, so I guess I do get it, even if it is a bit frustrating as someone who wants people to take the internet back from corporations and oligarchs. Sorry for being a bit overly dismissive. I think it’s just that I’m a bit of an old school guy, and so I mostly just hate the idea that the entire internet needs to be centralized around one website/app/platform and that any small degree of choice or distribution is a bad thing.


  • That’s really too bad… They are a super talented developer and they were doing something really cool, and making great progress too.

    But if they were doing Asahi Linux for fun as a hobby, and if it isn’t fun anymore for a variety of reasons, then you really can’t blame them.

    I’m not sure if there is a “right” or “wrong” here, as this is just one person’s side of the story that acknowledges, but mostly glosses over, the possibility that they made mistakes or behaved badly at times too.

    But I can absolutely understand the basic concept of burning out because you don’t think your hard work is being appreciated, because people are making hard things even harder for you, or because users on the internet let their excitement about a thing push them too far into being entitled.

    Hopefully Marcan can find some time to relax and do fun and rewarding things with their time.


  • The fediverse being “endless wars about who is federated” is not really true, is it?

    Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don’t connect with people you don’t. It’s as simple as that.

    Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that’s a big part of what broke the internet in the first place…

    99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.

    I’m so sick of this dumb ass argument…

    People who complain about “servers” need to tell me what they think “the internet” is. The existence of servers didn’t stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?

    Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I’m going to be totally honest honest here: I don’t think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.

    These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don’t give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.



  • “Delaying” correctly implies that the outcome is inevitable, while not voting is absolutely something that helped Trump win, in the sense that many people who had the power to affect the outcome, and thus keep Trump from taking power, failed to do so.

    If you didn’t vote, it’s either because you were either happy or ambivalent about Trump winning.

    Personally, I’m much more mad at the idiot non-voters who made Trump and Republican control an inevitability than I am at just about anyone else at this point. As the government stands today, just about anything that the Democrats can do is merely symbolic, as the Republicans have all of the power over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches for at least 2-4 years (assuming we even have elections in the future). Democrats are politically irrelevant, as decided by the voters (and non-voters) back in November.



  • You’re avoiding the point: when you have the source code, the ability to build it yourself, and the right to continue community development in any direction you want, there is nothing that a company or any other entity can do to make your experience worse.

    If I don’t like the direction of Lemmy, for example, there’s nothing that stops me from forking the last known good version and continuing to use/develop that myself for the rest of time. It’s fundamentally different than if you’re someone who uses Reddit, for example, and you’re 100% beholden to the whims of what the developers decide. That’s the point I’m making.

    Call me a true believer, but I think FOSS is at least extremely resilient to enshittification. I say this as a long time FOSS user and current professional FOSS developer.


  • I disagree, forking and personal modification are the fundamental powers that FOSS licenses like the GPL and MIT give the user. They’re the whole point of why FOSS exists in the first place–it’s not about money, it’s about giving people the power to chance the source and build things for themselves.

    Copyleft takes that idea one step further by asking them to share their changes, of course.

    Obviously it’s great if everyone can align their ideas and desires to work together on a single thing, but the software world also benefits from having multiple projects with different directions and goals, because one-size-fits-all is never ideal.






  • Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.

    Ok, but what’s stopping them other than a lack of desire?

    FOSS programs can always be forked and developed independently of the original authors. That’s the “freedom” that makes them FOSS in the first place. I have no desire to make my own fork of Android and its tooling, but if someone out there really wanted to do so, I don’t see what is stopping them. (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)

    Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

    I’m kind of skeptical of this idea. FOSS has almost always been able to succeed in the long term despite having a small fraction of the development budget of proprietary software, often due to the passion of weekend devs essentially donating their time to the cause. Whether it’s Linux, Blender, Gitlab, Godot, Krita, etc., I can’t think of a single FOSS project that has funding anywhere near the same level as their corporate rivals.








  • Do yourself a favor and checkout Gunbuster (1988) and its loose sequel Diebuster (2004). Gunbuster was directed by Evangelion director Hideaki Anno (and it might be his most concise stand-alone work), while Diebuster was directed by his protege, FLCL director Kazuya Tsurumaki.

    Both are just 6 episodes, with fantastic Gainax animation, great soundtracks, and masterful storytelling. I strongly recommend watching the original Gunbuster before Diebuster, though it isn’t totally necessary.

    I know it may be a hot take, but I am not personally a fan of Gundam. Which seems like a perfect fit but for whatever reason every time I have tried to watch it I just never make it more than a few episodes in.

    As someone who is in the process of catching up on all things Gundam before seeing GQuuuuuux (the new Gundam by the creators of FLCL, Diebuster and Evangelion) later this month, I highly recommend giving it another try and sticking with it until at least the second half of the original Mobile Suit Gundam (0079). There are a couple reasons for this:

    • The back half of Mobile Suit Gundam is significantly better than the front half, and while the ending is a little bit rushed (the show got cancelled, or something like that), there are a lot of really nice Macross and Evangelion-esque concepts that come into it. Gundam really is significant to the history of anime in general and the mecha genre, and by the time I got to the end of it I finally understood why.
    • Watching the original Gundam makes watching Zeta Gundam (the direct sequel) much better, and it’s a show that build upon the lore and characters of the original in a fantastic way. I know it’s a big ask to suggest that someone watch a 50 episode show in order to watch another (arguably even better) 50 episode show, but Zeta is truly a 1980s anime masterpiece in the same way that Eva is a 1990s anime masterpiece.
    • If you ever watch the early Bones mecha anime Eureka Seven, which is pretty good in its own right, you’ll be amazed at how much it parallels the story and character development of the original Mobile Suit Gundam.

    Gurren Lagann (It seemed okay but I never finished it)

    There are a couple of rough episodes in the first half, but I love this show and recommend seeing it through. This is a show where the scale and scope of the story just snowballs into something really big and cool.

    Finally, have you watched the SDF Macross movie retelling, Do You Remember Love? Because if not, it’s fantastic and worth seeing.