A bit of a hot take. The only real difference between Lemmy and Mastodon is sorting of the posts, everything else is UI. You can have Mastodon experience very similar to Lemmy although it breaks a bit with high traffic. It’s actually quite useful to subscribe to low traffic text based Lemmy communities via Mastodon because new comments bump old threads and it’s kinda like old forums, especially in a client with threaded view.

You’re not allowed to notice that. You have to applaud that they’re pro-EU, centre-left, well dressed and smile with their perfectly white teeth. Democracy was restored with no legislation and EU loves us now.

…PiS is going to win the next parliamentary elections and I’m not even sorry for my fellow Poles.

It’s a problem from content moderation standpoint but also an opportunity. Threads is not trying to steal users from Mastodon, they are already orders of magnitude bigger and current crowd would never switch anyway. The other way around is not so certain. If Threads sucks but you can still participate in it without having an account there then Mastodon becomes a very attractive proposition for people who would never consider ActivityPub based platforms before. Defederating mans you’re robbing yourself of opportunity to court those people.

Also, it’s important to note the timing of when Threads became open to the public and where. For months it was unavailable in the EU because of uncertainties related to Digital Services Act, which among other things enforces interoperability on big platforms. Details for existing ones are still being worked on but Threads was the first big one that launched since it came into effect. It’s been speculated that Threads got a green light from the EU commissioners because they promised interoperability early on. It’s quite likely that Meta had no choice but to open itself up and we’re just enjoying fruits of EU not bowing down to American corpos.

I’m getting an impression that Jordan Rudess has not been up to the task for years now. This song could be carried by Kevin Moore easily despite how boring Petrucci is now.

I’m happy enough with the discourse being „how would we chop Google into pieces”, I know my dream is probably just a dream haha.

YouTube is probably the biggest streaming service out there. They’d have no issues negotiating a sweet deal with some ad company, former Google or other. As of now most YouTube users are products sold to advertisers so we’d benefit from adjusting this a bit too.

I have this radical idea that Threads users are people too.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to move to a server that federates with Threads so that you’re not at a whim of Meta but still able to talk to people there? The point of social networks is communication with friends and those might not be so eager to jump. They might even hear from you how other servers and apps are better and move eventually :)

It really isn’t. Lots of weirdos came out during the pandemic. It’s pretty much a cringier Facebook now. The only difference being you have to be on FB for some neighbourhood groups and you have to be on LI for your unimportant job at a multi-billion dollar company.

All of them do this to some degree unless you quotation mark the shit out of search terms but in my experience Qwant is better than others at this. If they didn’t do it at all many common search terms would be very hit or miss. This is my obviously just my opinion and your mileage might vary.

The biggest downsides you need to prepare yourself for in every other search engine are lack of Google Maps integrations (they’re so far ahead of everyone :/) and no Reddit results. The first one is offset by just how shit Google is now. The other is more tricky but I believe Reddit is so astroturfed that it’s no longer useful except for some niche communities. I do Reddit searches via Redlib so that spez gets none of my data.

It wouldn’t fly anywhere but I’d laugh my ass off if some tech giant did it and then got bailed out by the state in return for controlling stake.

Take a look at what Epic is doing and why - companies that are rich and salty enough are great allies against even bigger tech giants. Whatever remains of Google would still be able to afford lawyers and argue that the same should happen to Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft :)

There’s plenty of good, free and non-invasive search engines. Give Qwant a try!

There’s so much to chop off there. They’re an ad monopolist, cut that. Their YouTube business is self sufficient, cut that. Android and Play Store? Chop chop chop. Cloud Services? Chainsaw goes wrrr. Google, Chrome and assorted services could stay with Google for brand recognition. All of them would be still very big and dangerously influential.

Pretty much most of the big tech needs it.

Yes. Have you ever used Apple TV? This thing is leaps and bounds ahead everything of else, even Shield in terms of pure performance.

Even if things go well it will be one thing at a time probably. This news doesn’t sound big because Google is so big but for businesses dependent on Google infrastructure this is a major win, no?

My perspective might be skewed since I live in EU and we mostly won right to our data and privacy.

I meant “next big corpo beaten into submission by regulators”. I don’t think Epic gave up on them yet.

Apple TV doesn’t try to do much other than being a very technically capable passthrough. You get pretty much every streaming service, multiple Plex clients etc. And no ads.

My 1st Gen ATV4K is 7 years old now and was buttery smooth until last tvOS update, now it’s only slightly smoother than most high end TVs. That’s quite a good run.

Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and get an Apple TV.

Google is big enough to be considered a monopoly in mobile phone operating systems. Play Store is technically a separate service / business which enjoys unfair advantage of being installed by default. I think this approach might be good because it’s better for user experience (unlike EU web browser thing for example) and has a good shot at postiviely affecting power balance between app developers and platform owner.

I’m curious how this will play out. Apple should be next obviously.