So is the ISP you're using a scam? Your electric company? Your own job? The place where you get your food? Your doctor is a scammer? The people who maintain the roads?

How am I meant to take an article that opens by claiming the entire economy is based on scams and gambling seriously?

We content if we want to.

Java applets were definitely in heavy use in webpages. They just kind of sucked. It was absolutely prolific, though.

And don't forget Quicktime!

There was also a period from like the 00s through the mid 10s where search was much better than it is today. The AI generated slop in results that we see now just wasn't a thing at all.

Maybe this can be a path toward independent software that's less RAM intensive. It's kind of wild the amount of overhead that's now required to accomplish tasks that were functional in the 90s when that much space simply did not exist on any consumer product.

Be a decent person!

That's crazy because my inhaler matches my department.

Yeah, agreed. The one thing the platforms you see that aren't YouTube that creators actually use have in common is financial incentive. Nebula is the best example here. Creators get a cut and have more creative freedom, so they actually use it and try to direct their audience to it for bonus content, which seems to actually work. Patreon is similar for a lot of creators, letting them put out additional content with fewer restrictions and letting them get more income from their viewers.

Some people also seem to have some success with independent platforms. If you look at like a Dropout or Viva Plus, these are both putting stuff out on YouTube and then drawing users in with subscriptions, and that seems to be a sound model.

But Peertube produces zero dollars for creators, which means they have no incentive to push users there. In fact, they're incentivized to avoid doing so because there are other platforms that will actually pay them if they can direct traffic there. Peertube lacks both the money-making side of things and the exposure side of things, so there's no real reason to use it.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see something independent like Peertube take off, but the model doesn't really work.

I mean, the way to use Lemmy/Piefed is to have multiple accounts. You don't need to "migrate" anything, just start using it.

I do see this tendency from people coming from reddit to kind of fetishize the "status" of their accounts and try to preserve everything they've ever said as if anyone cares, but that seems both unhealthy and unrealistic. Nobody is digging through your posts from 6 months ago for content, and no one will care that you haven't reposted all your passing thoughts to a new instance.

If you look at the users who are active across multiple accounts, they're recognizable without worrying about what instance they're on. Like I have no idea what instances Stamets or cm0002 or whatever are using at the moment or how many of their posts exist where and I don't really care. I read my current feed, comment a little, post once in a while, and it seems like that's what most people do.

Do you walk around with a tape recorder meticulously archiving every spoken conversation you have in real life? Would such a thing make your interactions more significant? Just keep that shit in your brain and the collective memory of interactions with others and get on with your life.

Aren't those attempts to jack your steam account? I remember hearing something a few years back about people being able to "recover" an account by having a certain number of friends put in a ticket saying it was stolen.

Or maybe that was discord. Either way, as a result I don't add randos.

Early access can be great. DayZ spent years in early access and was at the time an incredibly fun janky experience that myself and a lot of other players have fond, chaotic memories of. It's neat to see how far it came, and the game that exists today wouldn't be here without that process. Those memories of exploding legs and invisible zombies are worth something.

If you absolutely must have a finished game when you spend money, don't pay for early access. Nobody's forcing it on you. But for those who like the look of a project and want to help get it off the ground while also getting to participate in its early stages, it can be rewarding.

And yeah, there are going to be games that flop in early access, but there are also plenty of games that flop on official release. I'd take some unique and interesting jank over something polished but boring and uninspired any day.

I love movies and watch them constantly, but I'd probably check out if you asked me to watch a WWI movie with pacing and conventions typical of the 60s too. Classics are important for a film class, but there's plenty that can be learned from films made after 1970 too and they tend to be a lot more palatable.

This is honestly a terrible example to use as a general lack of interest. They're film students, obviously something drew them there, it just wasn't war dramas from the middle of last century.