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

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  • This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.

    You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion.



  • I literally don’t set up my voicemail, and I typically don’t listen to recorded audio that gets messaged to me. Texting is functional and doesn’t leave me some anxiety-provoking message that I have to sit through and digest without saying anything. If a conversation needs to happen in voice, text to say that and see if it’s a good time.

    Wild that people just ring a personal phone number unprompted in 2024 without that being an established routine.

    That said, I also remember when it wasn’t at all weird to show up to someone’s house and knock on their door. Things have really changed.




  • It’s two-way. It prevents interactivity between the instances, meaning that Mastodon doesn’t get flooded with Threads users and Threads doesn’t get access to Mastodon content.

    Preventing both of those things is a win for the fediverse, because it preserves its identity and purpose rather than just being 10% of a network controlled mostly by Meta.

    Allowing both of these things to happen is a win for Meta, because their users overwhelm the fediverse and they get free content until it no longer exists.

    We don’t lose anything by staying away from Meta, unless you like really love Facebook and want that to be what the fediverse is reduced to. Unchecked growth isn’t a win, it’s cancer.


  • The reason embracing works is because it creates connections between people using the system and allows them to piggyback off of other services.

    At the moment, the wider fediverse may not have a ton of people, but the quality of content blows mainstream social media out of the water. By making it available through Threads, new users are going to be encouraged to follow their normal pattern of gravitating toward the big thing while still having access to this content. If we post on servers federated with Threads, every piece of content we add is a boon for Meta for absolutely free. The fact that they have deep pockets means they already have independent federation beat on the server end in terms of stability and long-term reliability. It makes a lot of sense for the average user to just grab a Threads account and not worry too much about which other instances have the odd hiccup or potentially stop existing.

    On the other hand, if people exposed to the fediverse keep hearing about all this stuff that isn’t on Threads, there’s a better chance that they’ll get into the decentralized account model that’s natural to federation. The logical conclusion quickly becomes making accounts in places that are federated with the places you want to read and post, and if Threads isn’t connected to all those places it means it doesn’t serve to unify fediverse accounts under a corporate banner.

    Threads has a resource advantage, but we have a content advantage. If we let Threads in, the content advantage dissolves, because not only do they gain access to fediverse content, they pollute it.

    Thankfully the reality is that the choice will always lie with server owners, not via consensus. As long as the owners of servers with higher-quality content and better moderation don’t open the floodgates to Threads, that pocket of high quality content that a Threads account can’t have will always exist.

    Personally, I suspect the above will be self-perpetuating, as connecting with a larger social media entity will degrade the quality of content. The best bits will always largely be inaccessible to the big sites.