Explain that to the average car buyer who sees the lower number and rules it out.

Doesn’t matter. If your PC is ever compromised, that feature is a one stop shop for stealing everything you have ever done on your computer.

How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages “don’t support them”?

This is Microsoft, an American corporation, actively developing the things the Internet spazzes out about China probably doing. How happy this makes China? Buddy, imagine how happy this makes every marketing company in the world, your local police department, and your own government, all of which have a much more vested interest in everything you do on your computer and are considerably more of a threat to you than the ruling party of a country on the other side of the planet. Seriously, y’all need to get your fucking priorities in order. It’s borderline satire how fast your average Lemmy user slaps the China Panic button as soon as a privacy-related issue hits their front page.

There should be no reason not to transcode onboard, right? Modern mobile devices could probably process video no problem and then the upload would be smaller and quicker than sending the original. Only issue might be long videos, but I think there’s a case to be made that these types of platforms should have a firm duration cap of only a few minutes tops.

I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.

I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.

History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.

Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.

Please don’t leave me hanging.

It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.

Now that emulation is allowed on iOS, I would think this is the worst time for either of them to start selling ROMs for iPhones. If Nintendo launched a Virtual Console app years ago? Easy money, no question. Captive audience in a closed ecosystem. Now? If I open the app store and see an app that can play Pokemon Red/Blue for free right next to an app from Nintendo that charges me $5 - $10 for the same experience, why would I pay?

Regardless, Nintendo wouldn’t even try to sell you ROMs these days anyway. They’ll sell you a subscription service like they do on Switch. No thanks. I’m good with the emulation we have now.

Incredible. Their “AI” is just a bunch of people watching cameras in India.

That’s not communism, that’s just a worker co-op.

It worked for Netflix. It’s easy to scoff at the clearly customer-antagonistic policies these services are turning towards, inevitably accompanied by the “well, they lost me as a subscriber” flood of comments. But the unfortunate truth is the vast majority of people just shut up and pay, resulting in big net income for the corporations that enact these policies.

Linux users are what everyone says vegans are.

Meanwhile I’m thinking “ey, sounds like they’re getting enough money, now maybe they can leave me the fuck alone.”

Does it open Firefox instead, then?

Kinda hard to just trust those sites not to hide malicious shit in there.

OK, but is it actually booming?

Piracy of movies and T.V. shows really took off when torrents first appeared in the early 2000s. It seemed to peak five or six years ago, as new streaming services proliferated.

According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, piracy bottomed out in 2021—before increasing again. “Current piracy levels are still nowhere near what they were five years ago,” Van der Sar wrote in a recent article.

We’re seeing a slight uptick possibly because of how fractured and inconsistent the streaming services have become, but we’re definitely not in some piracy renaissance yet.