[-] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an "everything app" on WeChat's success in China, which basically does what he's talking about. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn't popular in the west at all.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

Sure. Just look at Wordpress... it's a blogging platform rather than a forum, but it has an ActivityPub plugin available that allows federation of blog posts and comments. ActivityPub is a standard published by the W3C (the same organization that oversees the HTML standard, among many others). Anyone can implement the standard in their software if they want to.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It’s the first change to the Office default font in more than 15 years.

Man, I remember the change to Calibri, and now I feel really old.

[-] [email protected] 33 points 2 years ago

There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.

[-] [email protected] 50 points 2 years ago

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I think it's because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.

[-] [email protected] 148 points 2 years ago

That's a click-baity headline that doesn't really match the content of the article. Microsoft isn't going to be replacing desktop Windows installations with cloud installations, and nowhere in the article does it suggest it is. Many, many businesses require Windows installed on the desktop (and no, many of those can't switch to Linux, because the software they use is usually Windows-only). The article doesn't dig into who is currently using Windows 365 to stream the OS, but I would assume it's companies that are running computer kiosks, point-of-sale systems, or systems that would otherwise be extremely locked-down (like bank teller systems). Businesses that need system flexibility and resource-intensive applications aren't going to be using a cloud-based OS. Pretty-much any business that does engineering or creative work falls into that bucket.

My interpretation of the article is that they want to extend cloud-based Windows to other users that have extremely lightweight requirements. The biggest market I see is the education market, where you generally want to provide students with very locked down functionality. The article mentions competition with Chromebooks, which is also huge in the education space. I could see this as a competitor to an iPad/tablet too, for those who mostly do browsing, email, or lightweight web-based MS Office tasks and want to have a keyboard and mouse.

TL;DR: People are wildly misinterpreting this article, and there isn't going to be any kind of mass exodus to Linux because of Microsoft investing in Windows 365. Microsoft isn't going to stop selling installable copies of Windows.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

There's evidence in the modlogs that the Lemmy developers (who are also the admins of lemmy.ml) have been banning users and removing posts from lemmy.ml with a reason of 'orientalism' or 'racism' when those users say anything mildly critical of China.
So it's a bit more than just refusing to suppress anti-American content on their instance.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

You seem to be missing two rather important points.

First, users have no obligation whatsoever to ensure Reddit is profitable. That is not our job. We're the customers (we also arguably create all the value of the service, but let's set that aside since nobody's expecting to get paid for commenting on threads on Reddit). If Reddit needs to find a way to be profitable, then it's up to them to do it in such a way that doesn't damage their business. They have full control over all of this, and have consistently made the wrong decision every step of the way. Reddit management could easily have done what most other companies do in situations like these and backpedaled, given some kind of pseudo-apology, and found a way to do what they want to do in a less objectionable manner. They didn't. If Reddit goes the way of MySpace, it'll be the fault of the /u/spez and the others running the business.

Secondly, the company was founded in 2005. That's almost 20 years ago. If they haven't found a way to be profitable in that amount of time then they're not going to. They have a fundamental business problem they need to fix, and they're in a tough spot because most solutions to that problem will end up damaging the business they're trying to save. Sucks to be them, but they really should have thought of that over a decade ago.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

I think it's useful as a protest because it makes things more annoying for the "average" user. Those of us who've already migrated to kbin or lemmy are the ones who were always more likely to go somewhere else. Having obvious, visible, and sustained protests on Reddit (especially in large subs like r/pics) makes it so the average "I just want to use Reddit" user will at least notice something is up, and possibly annoy them enough to go seek out alternatives. And it also causes journalists to write news articles about it in mainstream publications, so even people who aren't on Reddit are finding out about it. Sure, it might drive up ad revenue in the short term, but I think it will have the longer-term effect of getting more people interested in moving off of Reddit.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

What you're proposing is pretty antithetical to the way the fediverse works. Kbin and Lemmy are two completely different pieces of software that just happen to communicate with each other. There can easily be more (and probably will be in the future) that name their version of a subreddit something else entirely. Heck, Reddit could conceivably add activitypub federation and then you'd literally have subreddits as part of the fediverse.

The entire point is that things are decentralized so the users and developers that make use of the fediverse can do whatever they want with it and so that no single person, organization, or community can enforce their decisions on everyone else.

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trynn

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