ISP’s give us access to the Internet. And we pay them for it. Google makes money via ad aggregation. We already know they were able to do this without siphoning up all your data because they literally made money doing it before 2004 when they launched Gmail. What you’re talking about already exists though. User subscriptions for Email, VPN’s, Search Engines etc already exist and people are using them. People are paying for them.

People also generally understand that if they aren’t paying for a service then they are the product. The thing is though, lots of those people are fine with ads so long as the ads don’t get in the way of them enjoying the product. If I open a website they don’t need to have a full page ad open up when the site page loads. But they do that anyway and that’s what people are largely pushing back against.

Additionally, if these companies want our data? They should do a much better job of safeguarding it, or be held responsible in a meaningful way.

I’d love to know what you do when you can’t find a DVD still in print? Media companies like Disney and Paramount etc have been deliberately limiting the number of DVD’s and other physical formats available, putting whole movies and series “in the vault” for the purposes of manufacturing scarcity. Piracy is largely a matter of economic affordability and ease of access. I can pirate. The point is when I had these titles available to buy, I bought media rather than pirate it. I preferred to. And when it’s not easily available or locked to specific services I’m boycotting etc there’s few avenues left. I can appreciate that you were trying to give me a legal avenue to obtain what I want, but I feel like you missed the forest for the trees here.

Looks like from a cursory search only 12 of them available of about 22.

I was. Until they made that so difficult and time consuming that the barrier to entry was too high. Not because of the price. But because of availability. When Google play music was a thing? I bought music. When streaming took over I moved to Bandcamp. But Bandcamp doesn’t have everything. There’s no music stores anymore where I can just go and buy music. It’s all Amazon and similar.

I’d love to own the ghibli collection. But to get it I have to buy the DVD’s (and have a DVD player to play them on), or I have to pirate them. No digital store front seems to have the whole collection. This happens all the time with media that I’m willing to pay for.

A couple of things happened for me. One was switching to a specific instance that wasn’t my own and finding that posts just disappeared. I then forced the app to stop in settings and went back in. Nothing doing, no posts loaded. Then I signed out and signed back in. No luck, same result. I had to uninstall and reinstall to get the app to show content again. Then there’s the random replies that go missing or don’t show up in the inbox but are there when I go back to the post and magically after I see them in post they show up.

A lot of the time I will look at a post and it doesn’t log it as being read. Or it’ll log all posts and being read and then I end up not being able to load more posts (despite my settings not having scroll to read enabled). I’ve gotten the no comments on posts with comments. I’ve gotten the ghost comments with no text. There’s been other stuff too.

I never know what glitch I’m going to encounter.

Listen. SYNC for Lemmy is so broken atm that I have switched first to Boost (also randomly broken in some ways), and then to voyager.

I love sync, don’t get me wrong. And I was a sync for reddit user before I switched to relay. But I’m not the type to stick around and try to troubleshoot an app the developer doesn’t prioritize. I appreciate what LJ did for those of us who bailed on reddit. I appreciate that the app gave me the functionality I wanted for Lemmy. But on the other hand, we had prior notice that the update of the Lemmy platform would break things for those of us using third party apps that weren’t being updated and that means he had to have known.

When he has time and he gets around to taking a look at the state of the app, I guess I’ll circle back. But I am not going to spend valuable time on this if he isn’t.

Yeah. I wasn’t really sure if this was the answer or not, just that I had seen a potential conversation asking similar questions or along the same lines, and others seemed to have had a take on this.

https://lemmy.world/comment/16545391

It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a. Product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.

I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.

I did ask. Why is it like pulling teeth to get answers? I don’t use WhatsApp. Never got on that bandwagon. Something being free and open source doesn’t mean it’s good. Something being trustworthy from your standpoint doesn’t explain why it’s trustworthy to a layman who doesn’t understand why you think FOSS = trustworthy or good. It’s FOSS and you’ve looked at the code and found it to live up to its claims of being secure?

I’m not sure where the hostility is coming from here but I’m more pointing out that I can use a search engine to find out about matrix to some extent, but people who use the platform and have a better understanding of its pros and cons have valuable information to pass on. But when you ask them about it they’re full of recommendations but those recommendations often don’t have much in the way of information about what’s good about the user experience or feature set or even the code. I’m trying to show that the particulars of why you like or prefer something matter.

So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.

What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?

What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?

Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.

First and foremost I’d like to point out that this alarm has been sounded before. In the early 2010’s, in the late 2010’s, during the pandemic etc. Part of that is because megaforums like reddit (slack, github, and I guess digg) swallowed them up. Which is more convenient for the average user (younger internet users especially) who only have to go to one or two places with apps that allow them to use their phone to format in a readable/engageable manner for them.

I would posit that the internet forum isn’t dying exactly so much as it has morphed into things like the above mentioned megaforums. Those megaforums have their own trials and tribulations but they are popular for multiple reasons.

Ease of use - One tap to open an app you’re already signed into on a phone or tablet from anywhere.

Ease of discoverability - An algorithm that helps you to find things to engage with. An algorithm that promotes content that lots of other people engage with so that new users who don’t have preferences known yet can still find things they like.

Ease of navigation and search - I’m still using udm14.com to search for things on lemmy because if I don’t save them the search function on the site isn’t good and doesn’t always provide me with results at all. Reddit’s search is pretty bad but it’s still more usable than lemmy’s in a lot of ways.

Easy to sign up - I think this speaks for itself. Lemmy has a higher bar to clear for vetting an instance and even understanding the difference between instances than any other corpo platform, and while this has gotten easier over time, it will never be as simple as, go to this website and fill out the form to make an account.

I say all that to say that 1. we got here by ignoring the warnings for years and years. 2. We can compete but are unlikely to be the number one choice of the general internet masses for a lot of reasons. 3. Smaller forums will continue to die and get swallowed up by megaforum websites or platforms like reddit or lemmy because of the benefit of convenience on the user side and I believe we have probably reached the point of no return in that respect.

As to what we do about it? We cultivate ours to be better, add features and users in an organic way that would make our platform the preferred one. But we can’t really focus on growth alone and part of the reason for that has to do with the user subset who don’t want to become like reddit or digg etc. Additionally, I think we might be able to win over the artists and creators if we added something to prevent AI from scraping their works.

The main thing for users who are already here might just be better decorum. Lemmy users are often mean (myself included in that statement) to people who we view as stupid or ill-informed and we often treat them like trolls. We also assume a certain amount of known information about any given situation and act as if everyone should know, which is problematic.

One last thing I’d like to point out. People on the internet more and more engage with content they don’t have to read. I think that’s an important part of why forums are dying. Illiteracy is rising. It’s hard to have a conversation in written or typed forums when you don’t have that skillset. Discord allows people to engage via voice in ways lemmy just does not (this is not advocacy for discord because it’s not a forum and treating it as one is problematic on just about every level).

Nothing. I did this with two different handhelds. The main problem that I’ve run into is that the built in controls don’t work as well as if they had been natively supported and I would be more than willing to have a fix for that with an official steam OS distro if one was available. The point is, a closed mouth don’t get fed. If they don’t think people want this they aren’t going to dedicate time and resources to it.

Same. I don’t see how this could be a bad thing for steam OS and the naysayers are out in force.

Linux. They should do Steam OS. Their main downfall right now is windows and the price point. But for the price they often offer better hardware. Steam OS is a much better experience than Nintendo’s ecosystem and the dockability of these handhelds is already on par with the switch. They can do a lot more than the switch and switch two will be able to do with more game availability and game streaming as well.

ROFL They aren’t a solution. But they will be the solution for anyone wanting to get around them.

This comment is not the original. He changed it.

https://archive.ph/quYyb

This might seem like a weird fix but if you do happen to take apart the steam deck it can’t hurt to clean the stuck button with something like electrical contact cleaner (or 99% isopropyl alcohol), and then dry it with compressed air. That way any dust or debris that might cause a button to stick would be cleared away (hopefully).