Scrobling used to be huge back in the day of mp3s and last.fm practically invented it.There are also alternative APIs implementing the same idea. Unfortunately for them they never caught up on the age of streaming.
Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren’t many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I’d outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I’m not sure I’d be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it’s not lacking too much in software.
And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility....
Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
Unfortunately what’s going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. “We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue”.
Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I’ve been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.
Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.
There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.
Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.
I tried to pay something with Bitcoin instead of debit card a couple of years ago. The transaction took ~4 hours to clear and that's with fees totalling about 40% of the amount. Granted the original amount was like $10 but still way too slow and way too expensive. I understand that technically credit cards are not instant too, but there's an intermediary that guarantees that the amount has been reserved until the bank clears your payment. I wasn't expecting Bitcoin to be instant but 4+ hours is excessive.
That's 2-3 years ago so my experience might be outdated.
It is battle tested, standardized, widely used, have open source servers and apps, end-to-end encryption (OMEMO), self-hostable and are low on ressources and federated / decentralized....
I doubt it was accidental, that's standard tech corp playbook. Build on established technology or open standard,, then shut the gates when critical mass has been achieved.
It's trivial to self host. I'm running a server on a small VPS for the family. Best part is they don't even know they are running XMPP, just installed Conversations and that was it.
Yes Conversations is still a paid app on Play Store. The F-Droid version also doesn't support Google cloud notifications so some message notifications will go missing occasionally. For Android there's also Quickly which is a Conversations fork and aTalk which works OK but reminds me of 90s Windows software. It's still quite usable though. Honestly Conversations is totally worth the money if only for the amount of effort gone into modernising the platform which also a testament to its extensibility.
Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a...
Yes, I feel "social media" (or whatever this engagement driven, algorithmically fed hellscape can be called) is driving up the responses. We know, by now, how adversely social media affect the mental well-being of children, being bombarded all the time by the fantastic lives of plastic "influencers". Add to that cyber-bullying 24/7 which is now common, peer pressure for "green and blue bubbles" and a ton of other nonsense you can probably understand how people in a age bracket that there's chance of being parents might feel negatively about today's technological status quo.
You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It's especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.
My previous house was like that. Top floor flat, western facing, drowned in sunlight 14 hours a day. Nice and bright but during moderately sunny and warm weather it was minimum 28°C all day long.
As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
Don't sure if it's exactly hidden but for me Dungeons III (and 2) has been unexpectedly fun. It takes everything that made Dungeon Keeper and it takes a level higher. Pretty fun game.
2023 is shaping up to be one of the best years for gaming in ages. From Tears of the Kingdom to Diablo IV to Street Fighter 6, it's already been a pretty great year, with quite a few big-budget releases coming later this year...
I've been using RSS since before Google Reader was a thing. It's a fantastic way to monitor new papers in journals as almost all journals have been providing a feed since forever. I could go with a self-hosted option but I just ended up using Inoreader although I will probably migrate again. They used to have some entry level plans at some $20/yr but it looks like they are on their way out.
What's a cool website you’ve visited that no one seems to know of?
You never forget your first (lemmy.ml)
Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser (github.com)
And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility....
(Linux users !) What was the first Linux distro that you used ?
Are there any linux users here, am i asking this in wrong community ?, If yes then sorry...
Kev Quirk, one of the admins of Fosstodon (a Mastodon instance), destroys Meta in an email exchange. (fosstodon.org)
The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
New data proves almost no one uses Bitcoin as currency. It's actually more like gambling (theconversation.com)
Drones run linux: the free software movement isn't enough (j3s.sh)
IMHO XMPP / Jabber is the best Instant Messenger (IM) protocol
It is battle tested, standardized, widely used, have open source servers and apps, end-to-end encryption (OMEMO), self-hostable and are low on ressources and federated / decentralized....
Filipino fishermen in the UK live lives of peril and loneliness (ig.ft.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/128174...
Majority of Americans Would Like to Return to Time Before Cell Phones, Internet, According to New Poll (www.thewrap.com)
Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a...
Saturday thread
The weekend, and the rain, has arrived....
A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other. (www.theverge.com)
The UK Is a Hot Country. It’s Time to Build Like It (www.wired.com)
The UK’s houses are still designed to retain heat. In an age of global warming, that needs to change.
Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts (www.macrumors.com)
As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
193i Lithography Takes Center Stage...Again (semiengineering.com)
High-NA EUV is still in the works, but more chips/chiplets will be developed using older, less-expensive equipment.
What Indie hidden gems do you recommend?
Ive been trying some indie developed games this past year, more than ever and I'm in awe what lone devs or small teams can accomplish....
Which upcoming games are you most excited for?
2023 is shaping up to be one of the best years for gaming in ages. From Tears of the Kingdom to Diablo IV to Street Fighter 6, it's already been a pretty great year, with quite a few big-budget releases coming later this year...
How do you use RSS?
I use it for news aggregation with Next cloud news. Also for podcasts and PeerTube channels. Anyone using RSS for other things?
Image uploads have been enabled on lemm.ee! (Images are limited to 100kb for now)
Hello, fellow lemmings!...