Alba is a really sweet game with a photography mechanic. It's short and usually cheap and well worth the time you'll spend with it if it sends like something you'd like.

"Bite my ossified, decrepit ass."

It's grim. Obviously twitter still holds sway over a lot of people. And spreading malinformed propaganda is bad.

But it really underlines that anyone with any conscience whatsoever needs to disengage from it. It's not okay for governments to engage with it. And though I don't suggest that capital cares has any sort of conscience, but engaging with it has been increasing in cost and decreasing in benefit. NPR recently left, for example, and saw nearly no impact whatsoever. So the cost of leaving is low.

Ideally people would deny it any money, advertising or otherwise, until it ceases functioning. I suspect Musk will continue to be a delusional asshole for years to come. But at least twitter will be dead and gone.

It's stupidly easy and works well with any sauce that you're happy to dip bread in.

I'm a vegetarian, so I'm...whatever. But I see no real difference between cow/horse. I saw the six downvotes and was, if I'm honest, hoping for a little drama in the comments. But it's not here. It seems like kbin/lemmy may have plateaued re user growth, at least for the time being. And I've been a bit bummed about it, generally. But this was a pleasant surprise.

I played it on my PS5 and really enjoyed it. (To be fair I didn't pay for it) I've tried previous games and bounced off of them. But this one stuck. If it turns out to run okay. It may be worth it if you're interested.

Same with Relay... I checked it to see what the dead so would look like and all the genetic frontage posts loaded in... It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I think there is one main difference between xmpp and activitypub. A chat protocol gets better the more users it has. So the users were the killer app. xmpp arguably wasn't much worse off after Google left than before it got there.

Mastodon is a bit like this, in that lots of users are probably looking for the same type of content from the same users as they got on Twitter.

kbin/lemmy are a lot less like that. I just need enough people to surface interesting content and have a meaningful conversation. And I've already (mostly) got that now. If meta brought all of their users to link sharing it would probably get worse with clout-chasing, organic marketing, and low effort crap.

From a product side, I think most meta users who are looking for microblogging are happy enough with Twitter. So I think it will be tough to get a lot of initial buy-in.

In regards to the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns: I can't, off the top of my head, think of any feature adds that would outweigh fediverse peoples distaste for ads or corporate social media. I mean, are flashy ai filters enough to split the user base of a reddit-alike or twitter clones? Is anyone clamoring for vr group-chats to improve their link-sharing threaded convos.

I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, but I think the feature-poor nature of these types of services (that really aren't significantly different than old bbses) insulates at least those corners of the fediverse to some extent.

Plus, feature-creep is something people usually hate, or are uninterested in with big social media before this all started to pop off? Remember Foursquare check-ins, deals, credits, crypto, live audio...

This is a really good point. I have a PlayStation, (disclaimer) so I'm relatively content with their success in the buying-studios-to-produce-console-exclusives game. But it's objectively bad for the industry. Gamers don't benefit because they can't play where they want (or can afford), developers don't benefit because they lose creative control and market share (with the trade off of some short term capital influx), and publisher's don't even really benefit because its a game of mutually assured destruction that all ends up on Steam discount list anyway.

Plus: if Sony does manage a definitive win in the console wars that will shut down billions of dollars of investment that Microsoft is currently putting into the industry. And not just on the console side. That's bad for everyone. Microsoft has been leading the way in accessibility and interoperability between platforms (Game Pass on mobile/console/pc). And that's to be applauded.

I read somewhere (forgive me for not having a link) that the games industry recently shrunk for the first time in a long time. I think it largely has to do with tiktok and other more instant gratification choices for free-time. But gaming entering into the hellscape of streaming fragmentation is not drawing outsiders to the hobby.

IANAL, but I imagine that being in the middle of the ocean would provide some immunity because the "crime" was jurisdictionless.

I'm a vegetarian. Largely for animal cruelty reasons. But increasingly, and perhaps predominately, now, for ecological ones. I don't know how I feel about cultured meat. I've sat in a quiet room for the express purpose of thinking about this issue and I still don't know what I think. As a lifelong holder of very strong opinions, that's strange for me. Part of me thinks I should be asking vegetarians about this. But part of me thinks I should be asking people at large. Does anyone have a considered opinion about this?