Unfortunately if you want to play games with 0 hassle, Windows is still the only real option. Proton is awesome, but there are still games I want to play that either don’t work (or don’t work well), or require workarounds to get working

No one will convince me that there isn’t money laundering going on there. There’s just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money

If actual aliens are here it basically means travelling faster than light is possible.

Not just possible, but dirt cheap, otherwise why would they be constantly dropping down into Earth to see what we’re up to.

Really, the whole notion is a bit silly when you think about it rationally. If a society was advanced to the point of cheap FTL (which, I feel the need to point out, isn’t just “advanced technology” but “technology that operates in complete defiance to our most fundamental understandings of physics”), why on earth would they be dipping into the actual atmosphere, doing landings, or flying by private aircraft? Surely a society with such breathtaking technology could drop a single spy satellite into orbit and get every piece of info they could possibly want about us, especially now that we’re in the digital age.

I have no doubt that alien life of some sort is out there, very possibly it’s even prolific (though that doesn’t seem to be the case based on our admittedly limited observations of exoplanets), but there’s no rational basis for thinking that an advanced alien society would have either the means, nor the motivation, to constantly pop down to earth to screw with pilots, farmers, etc.

More pro-fascism

The main benefit is being in total control of your experience on lemmy

If you’re on someone else’s server, you don’t really have any control of federation, and your instance admins could just decide to defederate some instance that you enjoy seeing content from without your say. Similarly you may want to defederate from an instance, but on a public server you’d have to appeal to the admins to do so for the entire server.

Other than that it’s mainly a “because it’s cool” thing

Idk what phone you have today (though it sounds like android) , but by those standards I can almost guarentee that you already have a phone that does similarly privacy invading things

Then opt out?

Has kbin added the ability to follow hashtags yet? That’s pretty much the only feature that I need to be able/willing to fully migrate my lemmy/mastadon

One day - social media will break up NSFW tags into actual useful warning tags - so we can mute porn without blocking movie spoilers or troubling news articles and shit like that

Only posts though - not comments. Frankly i find that the posts from problem instances are rarely as bad as their comments

The guy who wrote the lemmy software is the same guy who runs lemmygrad. All of lemmy is “tankie bullshit”. I suggest you go back to reddit to be safe from us.

TIL that open source software is inextricably tied to it’s creators political beliefs…

Sorry bud, but despite tankies on this site being really fucking loud and argumentative, you’re drastically outnumbered by newer members who have no relation to lemmygrad or other tanky instances.

No fediverse social media site “belongs” to it’s creator or their beliefs, that’s literally the whole point. If you want a site where it’s creators are able to enforce their beliefs on their users, maybe you should go back to traditional social media

Ugh - that’s really frustrating especially since they must know this isn’t what everyone actually wants. Let us have personal defederation - it would solve the whole defederation controversy in one stroke. There would no longer be any reason for instances to make such huge decisions on behalf of all it’s users, and individuals can choose to disengage with toxic communities on their own

Possibly, what’s the brand of this crazy setup?

Sorry, Home Assistant - it’s a self hosted home automation platform.

Supports practically every smart device out there, can be totally self hosted, and has a great framework for building home automation dashboards for phones and tablets

I’ve got an instance running on my network and a few cheap Fire tablets running the HA app as wall panels mounted around my house, they display the weather and family photos by default, but when you touch them they have controls for all our smart lights, thermostat, etc

You say that as though people aren’t buying the shit out of them

I agree it’s kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.

I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it’s the coolest thing and asks where they can get one

The fediverse in general tends to attract more tech inclined people, this is due to a few reasons IMO

1. Tech people tend to be more privacy conscious, and so will often tend to prefer something like lemmy to something like Reddit/FB/Twitter/etc

2. Tech people love Open Source Software - the level will vary a lot, but I’ve never met a software engineer who doesn’t have good things to say about FOSS

3. The fediverse is slightly more complicated than traditional social media (not as much as many make it out to be, but inarguably its at least a bit more complicated). So tech-phobes are likely to be scared away, where as people with good technical literacy are more likely to both understand how it works, and see the benefits

Well Granny never had participated in building up the community for a burgeoning federated social media network (I assume at least, I don’t really know your grandma…)

Put much better than I could. More users means more toxic people, just because a certain percentage of users will be toxic - but that doesn’t mean that more users is bad.

Social Media sites only work at all if they have a critical mass of users to generate content, otherwise there’s literally no point to them.

I checked out lemmy back in 2022 when I first joined Mastadon, yknow what I found? A ghost town. Next to no content, and none of what little there was was particularly engaging. That’s not the users fault, there just wasn’t enough of them. Now my Lemmy feed is filled with content. Not all of it is great, but a lot of it is.

Honestly the fact that the OP is calling out entitlement and toxicity is ironic, because that’s the impression I’m getting from the post “how dare these redditors trespass into my social media network? And why are they not happy with every aspect of it?? And why aren’t they using the terminology I like?”

“universal” here is meant as “everyone in America can buy it”, right now there are lots of places in rural America where high speed internet just isn’t available at any price (except for satellite, which has its own problems)

Regarding your guess of what it is, it’s kind of even worse than that - this is far from the first initiative like this, and every time the ISPs just pocket the money, do barely any actual expansion, and call it a day.

So at the end of the day, as a country we’ll probably wind up with unchanged (or worse) internet prices, more or less the same coverage in rural areas, and 42b poorer in tax revenue

But hey, some ISP execs are probably going to get some fat bonuses, so we have that to be thankful for

Doesn’t solve the filtering issue though