which is less than bsky, but more than lemmy.

I think a lot of people get sucked into the idea that more is better. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I don’t think any of us really want to talk to a million different people anyway. We just want to talk to a suitable subset.

Deleting data from them might not be feasible, but there are other tactics.

[…] trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models.

I use RSS for sites where I want to read every update. That typically means serial comics; dev-blogs of indie games; other infrequent blogs; and some infrequent youTube channels (I don’t visit youTube other than via my RSS feeds);

Whereas I use Lemmy and other sites for skimming and browsing, and discovering new things.

I’m not sure about Lemmy, but I found this post to be a good explanation of how Pixelfed interacts with Mastodon.

Based on what it says there, I wouldn’t really expect it to play-nice with Lemmy though. We might be able to access Pixelfed posts here on Lemmy, but almost certainly not the other way around - because Pixelfed requires an image in every post.

I assume the primary reason for Valve supporting Linux is to protect themselves against possible hostility from Microsoft. So yeah, it’s a business decision to protect Valve’s profits; but frankly - it’s also beneficial to everyone who isn’t Microsoft.

Overall, I’m not a great fan of Steam. (And generally it’s me talking down Steam; recommending itch.io and GOG; and sometimes even defending Epic against what I think are unfair attacks.) But here I’m just saying that I don’t really see the negative of Valve creating Steam OS. Although I don’t intend to use Steam OS, I think I’m already benefiting from the support Valve has given Linux to create Steam OS.

I’m not sure that Valve working to making Linux gaming a smoother experience is a strong example of them being money grubbing and anti-consumer.

Do you think Eugen has been personally moderating all Mastodon instances up until now?

He hasn’t. Obviously the moderation system has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.

bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.

Back when I was on Twitter (a couple of years ago now), all links to Mastodon were explicitly marked as “unsafe”, and posts containing such links were demoted. So it’s apparently kind of normal for these social media companies to attempt to choke new competition as early as possible.

One advantage of Pixelfed is that it not a commercial company. So unlike Instagram, they do not have financial motivation to addict and exploit. So for people who are interested in seeing and sharing picture galleries, that seems like a good option to me.

(Personally I don’t use Instagram or Pixelfed, or any other similar service.)

Thanks. I do remember this now. I don’t remember it costing a lot of money, but I do remember people generally disagreeing with the idea of it - and then being amused by how it was to be implemented. And yes, to get around this filter I changed my DNS server from the ISP’s default to instead use Google’s. (This was far enough in the past that I wasn’t yet anti-google!)

I’m an Australian, and I don’t remember the ‘firewall’ that you’re talking about. Do you have a link or something to remind me?

I feel some sadness in seeing Microsoft’s slow sludge of enshitification oozing forward and gradually engulfing github. There’s still a way to go before it become totally crap, but it is definitely getting worse and will continue to get worse as Microsoft does their best to mine whatever value they can from everyone passing by.

Knowing this, I think it is wise to start looking at alternatives.

I’ve stopped using github because I hate advertising and nags. Probably most people don’t care much about it, but for me github nagging and ‘reminding’ me about copilot is just so off-putting that I immediately want to leave the site. I don’t want my attention stolen like that.

I’ve found Mojeek to be a bit hit and miss; but one thing I really appreciate is that they actually do the indexing and searching themselves (whereas pretty much every other search site uses Bing or Google behind the scenes). So although Mojeek may not be ideal, they are at least making an effort to be independent.

I’ve thought about this a fair bit, and I can definitely recall a bunch of cases from primary school and high school when I opened up about my feelings and personal stuff; and it ended badly for me. It ended badly every time, and I reckon that’s why I basically don’t tell anyone anything about myself now as an adult. I don’t even share most stuff with my partner, or my family - such are the scars of past experience.

I’m sure this is similar for many people.

I use to have a PayPal account. I used it to receive donations from some open-source projects that I was working on. And I passed most of the money on by re-donating it to other people who were also sharing high quality work that I liked. It was never very much money (like maybe a few hundred dollars in total over years); but I kind of enjoyed that.

But around 10 years ago, that PayPal account was blocked, because of who I’d sent money to. They didn’t tell me specifically what the problem was, they just told me that it was ‘suspicious’ - and they (PayPal) demanded personal info from my to prove my identity before they would unlock the account. They wanted photos of drivers license and stuff like that.

Long story short, I eventually did get them to unblock the account (and I did not send them personal info); but that experience destroyed my confidence and trust in PayPal. So I drained the account, and haven’t used them ever since. I very much don’t like the idea that a company can just take my account (and money) hostage for totally arbitrary reasons and make demands based on that.

You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.

But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.

So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.

You’ve pretty much got it. It’s bad, but it’s not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn’t work… but only by luck. It’s possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.

I’m not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn’t have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can’t be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG’s script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.

Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it’s a bit low-effort.

Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn’t the only thing that can cause something to not work.