It's gonna be funny if users vote in favor of the protest and against pro-spez mods.

Maybe he will start editing other people's votes too!

A fursona is a better investment, benefits include:

• cute (even when you deny it)
• everyone loves it
• can be whatever you want, lots of choices
• expression of your inner self
• versatile
• can't really be stolen
• inner emotional support
• increases in personal value as you grow with it
• won't lie to you about making free capitalism coins™

That's really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it's a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.

A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won't solve the monopoly of Steam, you'll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.

That's not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don't get the same level of experience.

This sort of thing is why it bothers me when people mention staying and fighting on centralized platforms. You are fighting code, your existence on these places is not tangible and you can be stripped of it without physical force. Online dictatorships are not like offline ones, they can only fall when they run out of money, which happens when they run out of all of you.

Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it's all signed and unpatchable.

Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren't that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

But that's not a very profitable model, because it's all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

Not official, but who cares, Xenia is the best!

I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.

Not sure myself, I'm trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren't anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you're starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there's no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won't align with yourself or the other workers fully, it's just a question of degree.

Electronics, once you realize that you can pretty much build anything you need if you can find a chip for it you're unstoppable, at least as long as you can gather the energy to work on it (or to finally fix your broken soldering station)

That's freaking huge if it happens, an entire community full of rust programmers moving to a project written in rust...

Making tech thinner and sleeker doesn't always make it better, I think devices that follow their function look great!

Doesn't mean there should be no product design, but don't try to hide things for the sake of hiding them, leave the screws visible, show off the internals, try to complement them!

#cyberfurz-official:cyberfurz.chat and #home:furs.chat are good spaces to join if you go with Matrix, maybe others could also chime in if they know any!

I'm very afraid another alternative is being conisidered here, and it's worse than any of these.

It's fascism.

And there's sadly precedent for it, economic crisis leads to political and social instability that can be cleverly exploited by appealing to peoples' emotions and putting them against an imagined enemy in other people, when the real enemy is hovering above us and cheering it on.

Hmm, you could probably extend the protocol to do eventual consistency across instances if that ever becomes a problem, remote instances could keep their own counts and only send aggregated updates.

Yeeeh I fucking hate tankies...

They're just like nazis, but they're almost always competent trolls who know how to be annoying.

That's what happened with musky husky, but it'd be very in character for spez to change the actual results to his liking lol

Yeah, it's probably worth it to slightly push back against these people irl, because there is a chance that's the signal they need to change, but online they can just copy your responses around and use them to further their crap. They probably love getting attention inside furry spaces like this one.

Best option is to ignore them, or if you must interact, troll around so it's at least fun for you instead of being exhausting.

I guess the latest twitter wave is sort of relevant to me since a decent number of furries moved over, though I still feel like some more popular members of the community failed us there, because I haven't seen any of them trying to use their influence to do anything, and I feel like they should put in at least some effort to research that.

I also haven't seen anyone really promote their fedi accounts on other places even if they got one, but every YouTube video out there has a mention of twitter and other mainstream sites.

You're right about the culture, redditors have more agency, and it feels like twitter has turned people into zombies who don't think anything except what their timeline (if you can really still call it a timeline) feeds them, the moment it disappears from there it's as if it doesn't exist.

Really makes me wonder what platforms like tiktok where the user agency is maximally removed must be doing to people's brains, I've never used it so I can't tell exactly, but the 100% passive attitude of my younger siblings to it, social media and what happens within it gives me a hint.

In general I hate how the dynamics of social media crises like this always go, or be it any other platform where there are strong personal connections. People are like "Yes! Let's go!" and then some of them freeze up and wait for what others do, people who went first eventually come back because nobody followed them to the new place.

I guess the issue with Twitter is people have no option to organize and make decisions as a whole, except for relying on the algorithm designed to promote rage and novelty promoting a consensus for a day or two before it goes away.

I guess we'll see how the reddit thing goes and if it's any different, we'll have two data points to compare.

I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that's something we're really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.

As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I've seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.

We need something to replace ads, that's for sure, or at least decrease their influence.