Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.
For Google it’s just another day in the office.
As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.
The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium’s developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.
The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google’s whimsy.
Pragmatically it doesn’t matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.
From my PoV it’s probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.
Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).
Omg yes!
Stop asking all the trite personality questions that everyone in the conversation knows is a prepared answer to a prepared question. There is absolutely no sincerity and honesty involved, which absolutely defeats the purpose.
Yep lemmy.world is live (stress) testing in production. It has its benefits, like when a set of patches were committed to vastly improve performance that was a big problem on a huge instance like lemmy.world but not on the smaller ones, and its downsides with all the random issues that pop up which happen when testing live in production.
Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.
Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.
Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.
As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).
At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.
BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.
I wonder if he feels people have ripped off his hard work? There are direct clones of his app.
In the software world this is to be expected once one puts out something that has any significant reach. “Copycatting” is aplenty, either for malicious reasons or merely as a tribute. Getting hung up on it is a great way to barrel down a endless pit of whack-a-mole. It’s ok to express a bit of disdain for it in some regards, but at the end of the day trying to intervene aggressively only leads to more pain and grief IMO.
A lot of people are taking what was learned in putting together Apollo’s UI/UX and adjusting them into new tools and applications for a new environment. It’s part and parcel of software in general. In the next few years we might look back and wonder why we even considered an Apollo for Lemmy to begin with given the trajectory of current development. And there is much to be said about continued longevity given the preference for open source paradigms of currently popular Lemmy apps.
Time will tell, I think, even if many of us around here are all eager to put Lemmy and this entire ecosystem into a time dilation bubble so multiple years of development can happen in a single day.
Doom scrolling on TVTropes is much more entertaining.
Wait maybe that’s not the best idea if one wants to be lulled to sleep.
Have you considered reading random research papers off PubMed?
I would love a version of “compact” that hides all thumbnails. It makes for an even more compact list of text rather than dedicating space for a square thumbnail, many of which are just empty because they are text posts and/or just outward going links, and I do enjoy the visual cleanliness that comes from not having a variety of different squares of colors against a black background lining the right side of the text.
Thanks for all the hard work on this!
One of the great things about lemmy.world’s insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there’s now real world production systems providing that opportunity.
The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.
I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.
It used to work on an older version of Apollo but doesn’t anymore.
Originally this worked on Apollo 1.15.12, but an update newer than that, 1.15.14, broke this feature (unfortunately).
Any big major for profit company embracing federation is purely for their own revenue generating goals and have no explicit want to be actually good stewards of the Internet, its communities, and about their participation.
Participating in Federation is another way for Meta to suck up as much data as it can to sell its advertising services.
I’ve functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.
The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.
A “multireddit” at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the “subscribed” feed).
Exactly! There is absolutely nothing wrong for both third-party developers using Reddit and Reddit itself to be profitable. However, Reddit’s leadership has decided this absolutely cannot fly.
There’s general broad agreement that if Reddit wants to charge for API access, that’s fine, but the prices and timelines are absolutely not practical for any third-party developer. All existing third-party applications today get by because of an exemption (signed under NDA). The fact that Narwhal’s developer has not divulged the specifics of the agreement and has generally pussy-footed around it when asked speaks volumes about Reddit’s “transparency”.
There were so many ways to monetize this out of the users directly instead of going after third-party developers; instead Reddit decided that the third-party developers were a direct enemy and competitor, rather than a value-added component of their platform. It’s absolutely stupid.
Reddit has been making promises and punting the action down the line for years.
So much of their work is half baked and incomplete, or just not fully featured, and usually only sufficient to be a minimally viable product
Anyone who sincerely trusts Reddit in this way is just asking for trouble.
macOS has had free upgrades since OS X Mavericks in 2013. Yea we can squirrel around the specificity of this (e.g. is it really free if you have to pay $99 to update Parallels?) but in pragmatic terms the actual OS has largely been free for consumer use.
I generally get the idea being communicated, but its content is so out of date at this point.
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.