I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. … But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. … Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn’t grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

I’m less convinced that it is happening here though, but I’m certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.

Yeah… Civ 1, 2, 3, and 4 were all good - for different reasons. Civ 5 was where the design decisions stopped being about gameplay and started being about maximising profit. Making the game functional and fun was lower priority to making paid DLC. Players buy the buggy and unfinished game… then pay more to fix it piecemeal with the DLC. Such is the power of brands and advertising.

We aren’t talking about security though. We’re talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.

Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?

My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?

I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”

And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.

I’m half-way through the survey right now; and rather than continuing, just stalling because I don’t want to rank another set of three options that I don’t care about. Some of the choices already given were like “well, I guess I’ll pick the feature that I’ve at least thought about using once…” but now it’s just a list of 3 things that I don’t want whatsoever. I’m trying to give useful feedback, but I feel like I’m really just giving noise.

In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

I hope that Ladybirdy gets something good happening. I simply having a another browser in this space would give Mozilla a good sanity check for their direction and values. Otherwise they’re just kind of fumbling around.

I’m starting to worry about Mozilla. Firefox is still the best browser, and I’ve used it for many years… but there are more and more anti-features popping up that require a few settings to be changed. No one thing is a big deal, but I’m starting to feel the same way about Firefox as I did about Windows before I stopped using it: like it’s just trying to trick me into doing something I don’t want to do rather than aiming to be a good product.

I’m thinking specifically about the address bar getting ‘search suggestions’ from Google by default; and the special ‘ad effectiveness tracking’ that is turned on by default to help Facebook. Privacy should always be the default setting. We shouldn’t have to keep up-to-date with the latest features and settings just so that we know what to disable!

Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.

Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.

On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’

The examples given are not problems with science and time-scales. They are examples of the corrupting influence of money. Companies push their product as being fantastic, and deliberately cripple any science that would challenge their profits. Cigarettes are probably the most famous example of this.

I like the meme - but the identity of the villain hasn’t yet been revealed. I’m sure lots of people are keen to see who’s behind the “Jia Tan” mask.

And so the microkernal vs monolithic kernal debate continues…

Over the years, Microsoft has been quietly taking away control from the users.

There’s been a transition from normal settings that you can do whatever you want with, to “yes / remind me later” settings that Microsoft uses to badger you until you submit, to finally just no setting at all - just quiet compulsory data collection and surveillance; with various bits of mysterious software that you can’t uninstall or disable or halt - because you’re not the admin - Microsoft is.

It wasn’t always this way.

Yeah, it’s a minor annoyance… another minor annoyance on top of all the others. And another personal data leak (or siphon) to go with all the others.

This on its own is not worth switching OSs for - but as a piece of a larger picture it’s yet another reason to consider it. And for some people this may be what tips the scales in their evaluation.

Better still, stick with DRM free games.

I first tried Linux around two decades ago, and it felt clunky to me - so I didn’t stick with it. I tried again around one decade ago; and it was a lot better, but I still didn’t quite have enough reason to keep using it yet. … But now, finally, I tried again several months ago - and I’m definitely sticking with it. I’m currently using Mint.

There are still some thing that I think are worse in Mint compared to Windows. But there is a lot of stuff that’s much better. It’s more than enough that I don’t expect to ever switch back to Windows again. The main thing is avoiding all the anti-features of Windows, such as the constant nagging to switch to Edge or activate their search bar; and the ads & other cruft in the start menu; and the constant little popups and ‘reminders’ about new stuff; and the lack of control in when updates are installed; and the ubiquitous harvesting of personal information, including ‘telemetry’ of which apps you run and when.

For me, one of the last straws was when I clicked on a help link from Windows settings, and it automatically opened in Edge, and Edge then automatically imported my browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox and automatically uploaded it to my Microsoft account. I was horrified that it would do something like that without any interaction whatsoever. I didn’t even think Edge had access to my Microsoft account until then, because I deliberately avoid using one to sign in, or for any other reason - the only reason it exists is because I used OneNote. I wanted the account to be isolated to just the app I used it for; not to automatically be grabbed by the whole OS and then used to collect my browsing history.

So yeah. I’d spent years of maintaining an ever-growing list of little system tweaks that I used to keep as junk off Windows as possible. But I’ve had enough. It’s too much. It’s not even close to being worth it. Linux has some minor problems, and some things take a bit of getting use to. But at least it isn’t systematically hostile.

Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.

We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.

You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.

I use to follow /r/degoogle on reddit… but it felt like pretty much every discussion was people shitting on every alternative, and implying that all measures are totally pointless unless you stop interacting with any form of computer for the rest of your life. It's just so weird having people say there there's no point switching from Chrome to Firefox because google is the default search engine on Firefox. I got to the point where I really did believe there was some deliberate destabilization going on, to weaken the community. (And it worked. I unsubscribed; and I'm sure it struggled to keep anyone who actually had anything useful to say.)

Anyway… I wouldn't be surprised if /r/RedditAlternatives was similar to that.