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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

    But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

    This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.


  • History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.

    Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

    The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.



  • It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.


  • Now that emulation is allowed on iOS, I would think this is the worst time for either of them to start selling ROMs for iPhones. If Nintendo launched a Virtual Console app years ago? Easy money, no question. Captive audience in a closed ecosystem. Now? If I open the app store and see an app that can play Pokemon Red/Blue for free right next to an app from Nintendo that charges me $5 - $10 for the same experience, why would I pay?

    Regardless, Nintendo wouldn’t even try to sell you ROMs these days anyway. They’ll sell you a subscription service like they do on Switch. No thanks. I’m good with the emulation we have now.



  • Standing up for another’s lived experience is what an ally does. When a queer friend shares their experiences with me, I listen. I don’t dismiss them as paranoid. Whether or not I get Internet points for it doesn’t matter. All the more reason to hear them out, actually, because queer people are not the majority and their perspectives are easy to ignore if what you care about is which side the bigger number is on.


  • Getting tired of engaging with this. The point is at least two people who saw the meme interpreted it as harmful representation and felt strongly enough about it to respond. You don’t have to agree or even take action. Nobody requested the post be deleted or censored.

    You could acknowledge the perspective of someone with a different lived experience, consider it or don’t, and move on. Or you could do what you’ve chosen to do and deny that perspective and try to shut it up.



  • Yeah, it’s all from the same origin. The implication being that the one penetrating is “the man” and the one being penetrated is “the woman.” The other part of the implication being to fuck someone is good and powerful and dominating and being fucked is bad and immaculating and submissive.

    If that sounds like I’m adding my own words and meaning to a simple phrase, think about what is actually being said when you say “you’re getting fucked by Microsoft.” What, you don’t want to get fucked? Why? Sex is supposed to be a positive thing two people can do together. Unless the one “getting fucked” doesn’t want to and now we’re not talking about fucking, we’re talking about using violent rape as an analogy for what a software company is doing to its userbase and that’s just…kind of fucked up. I shouldn’t have to explain why, right?

    Anyway, no, I don’t get mad whenever I hear a phrase that stems from heteronormative ideas of sex. I don’t assume the person saying it is homophobic or an idiot, they probably just don’t know. But a friend once educated me on the subject, I thought about it, and I agree. So now I avoid using phrases like that, and when someone openly questions it like you have, cool, I’ll stop and talk about it.


  • It is literally the meaning behind the meme. There’s a silhouette of two men labeled “you” and “Microsoft” with the Microsoft man depicted as the top, the one doing the fucking, the one in the stereotypical position of power in the act. The message is, “Microsoft fucks you like this man fucks this other man in the ass.” I don’t have to spell this out, it’s what’s in the picture.