Spyke

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We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*

Any thoughts on overhauling cross-posting, to allow more interaction with the source interaction?

As far as I'm aware: currently when you cross-post, only the recipient instance gets all interactions (comments, upvotes), instead of duplicating to or having the origin solely receive those.

The current implementation hampers the growth of smaller instances when reposting something to a bigger one. Discoverability is still there due to seeing from which instance the post originates from, but that's arguably not enough.

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What's a good alternative to Gmail?

Gotta go for ProtonMail. Have been running it for a year and I kinda like how it's doing.

An additional feature is SimpleLogin's "Hide My E-mail" Aliases, which are "burner" e-mail addresses to use with pre-determined SimpleLogin domains (you can add your own domains as well to go around Proton's custom domain limit). Those are included in the full suite and Family subscriptions. (10 a month when subscribing for a year)

There's also a cheaper variant for 3.50 a month but it lacks the SimpleLogin feature. You can get SimpleLogin seperately for 30 a year, however.

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So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?

I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be "useless" for those using adblockers, after all, so I'd see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).

Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter's on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.

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What is everyone getting this Steam sale?

Had a bigger haul at GOG, but for Steam I got:

  • Persona 5 Royal (through Humble because of my Choice discount making it just under 30 bucks)
  • Another World (double-dip on Steam because the GOG release doesn't have the original Amiga ROMs as bonus content)
  • Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum (a new NES homebrew game published by Digital Eclipse - always been a decent emulation publisher)
  • NOMAD (another classic emulated title)
  • Castle Crashers (one of my "indie titles to get" games on the old list)
  • Battleblock Theater (same reason as Castle Crashers!)

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Let’s talk about media collections: How do you keep your library of your favorite movies and TV shows?

I started getting into Blu-rays of favourite shows and films a while ago, recently made the switch to 4K UHD discs as well with my external 4K reader. Ever since the fragmentation of streaming services compared to music, I've started buying those Blu-rays to keep them in my collection for whenever I wanna watch them.

I tend to make a back-up copy of my discs to watch it through any device for flexibility. Especially as that's my way of enjoying 4K films on my 4K TV at the moment. HDR colouring definitely wow'd me when trying my first 4K disc. Not regretting it so far. 👍

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CompuVerse Deals Bot

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Now this is what I'd support. Hell, for bundles I'm willing to pitch in with manual help, as I've done that for reddit in the past. (And since Steam Deck Compatibility is harder to get through scraping/API calls, and SteamDB refuses to provide an API of their own or scrape, pointing to tools to do it yourself.)

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How many steam deck folks are here and what are you playing?

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I got to ask: what's your secret on still clearing the backlog since that time? I've gotten mine since June '22 if I remember correctly, and my backlog-beating definitely got reduced.

+rep for Spelunky and Rogue Legacy 2! Really loved my short play session with RL2 when trying several games out for my backlog list, but haven't gotten back to it. Spelunky I adore, but I can't deny it's frustrating to get through it despite actually making progress after a while.

Big respect to Valve and CrossOver for turning Wine into something more usable for handheld devices running Linux (and now even macOS is profiting from it with their Game Porting Kit). There are still caveats, but it's definitely good enough for me. Software engineers like us can easily tweak with settings or improve compatibility with quick tricks compared to a regular Joe, but it's still impressive. I've always wanted to build a tiny Raspberry Pi handheld just for coding, but this is way better.

gaming

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Xbox Games Showcase & Starfield Direct - Info & Reaction Thread

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I used to be optimistic for Microsoft since Phil Spencer got the Game Pass ball rolling, but I'm doubtful we'll see a lot of concrete games. Especially with his recent speech that "even with games we won't sell more Xboxes than PlayStations" (not that I care about the "console war", but that's definitely not a confident man speaking). If it's a splash, it would've been bigger if the CMA and the FTC didn't start stopping Microsoft from acquiring Activision-Blizzard-King.

I'm still rooting for them, though! Sony got some banger games, Nintendo's "set for the year" with TOTK and their other smaller games, now it's Xbox' turn to swing.

Edit: My biggest hope currently is them finally announcing rolling out Game Pass Friends and Family globally very soon. That's my "day one" purchase with 4 friends for sure. Would love to stream those games to my Deck.

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Xbox Games Showcase & Starfield Direct - Info & Reaction Thread

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I think it speaks to accepting the reality of where they are with regards to hardware sales. Agreed, but I wouldn't say the Xbox situation is as hopeless as he paints it out to be if they got XGS games to show for it. Especially with Sony's exclusivity deals (which luckily are far less than before, looking at Street Fighter 6 for example). Phil's philosophy of getting games on any platform (despite starting to Xbox/PC lock Bethesda games) definitely shows with third party developers nowadays.

Sony set the bar low this time around, so I think it'll be good. Last showcase with the Hi-Fi Rush shadow drop was a good format for them - quick, content-filled. If they stick with that type of format, I'm a happy guy.

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Fairphone 5's key specs revealed by Geekbench

I'm honestly disappointed at the hardware:

  • 8 GB RAM for a SKU is definitely fine by me
  • Android 13 from the get-go is good, though I do wonder how fast 14 and up will come, and how many system upgrades it'll get.
  • The Snapdragon 782G is simply the worst of this phone. It is a decent improvement over the 4's Snapdragon, but it's worrying to see a Fairphone being sold at mid to early-premium pricing while budget phones got the same power for much less. I am aware of the Degoogling and Fair Trade Gold and the repairability parts of Fairphone. But I don't see why they can not try and match some actual mid-performance phones nowadays.
  • Haven't heard anything about the display, but I would not be surprised if it will remain stuck at 60Hz - another pain point but this is arguably less of an issue and more of a wish I would had loved to see.

As long as other phones will have removeable storage (microSD slot) and are cheaper while beating FP's performance, I'd rather stick with them. Really a shame, hoped to see a much better phone this time around. But there'll be even more fierce competition with the EU law on replaceable batteries forcing others (including Apple even) to change to a better repairability model.

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How many steam deck folks are here and what are you playing?

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The pre-made controls feel a bit finicky with the shortcuts they made (as in: they may or may not function 50/50, not sure whether it's a game issue or not since the game has had a couple updates), but otherwise it genuinely feels good. I run it through Proton due to the latest updates not having been ported over to the native Linux version, sadly.

You can also use the touch screen controls just fine if you enable touch screen controls in-game and have the "touch screen is actually touch screen input, not cursor input" option enabled as an "Always-On Button" in the control scheme. But the game itself is buggy with that sadly. Usually those controls are fixed by disabling and re-enabling the touch screen controls.

Eventually I went "fuck it" and use the trackpads for the controls. Definitely not difficult to control, really easy to the contrary. But I've not messed around with fixing or replacing the shortcuts from the default controller scheme.