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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.

    Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn’t shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.

    And that’s why these companies and their devs don’t listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?



  • Yes you could but he didn’t and clearly his style was self evidently effective.

    Depends on how you define “effective”. Because by his own admission, it gets shit done, but also alienates people in the project and turns off others from joining it.

    So yeah, you’ll get the update pushed, and it’ll work, but down the line you find yourself struggling to keep up without the help of people that don’t want to work with you.

    Linus’ mistake is a classic one: really self-sufficient tech person doing fantastic work with a team but not appreciating that there’s a whole social layer to it that is every bit as important as the standards and procedures at keeping everything working.


  • Plex, to it’s credit, does make streaming externally from the home network easier. Setting that up with Jellyfin is a little more involved, but it’s also free, whereas Plex will make you pay for that. But if you have no desire to stream outside the home, it’s not an issue.

    Jellyfin apps on other platforms are a bit of crab shoot. Some are maintained very well, some (like the Android TV version) have fewer mainteners and go a long time without updates or fixes. For most users, they’re perfectly adequate, but it’s something to be aware of.

    Plex’s app support on various platforms is better, but much less controllable and customizable. That goes for the main UI as well. It’s polished but you’re stuck with whatever Plex decides to put there. You can customize Jellyfin much more, strip out things you don’t want, etc. You can apply custom CSS, too.

    Plex is a business, and therefore it has things it wants you to see whether you like it or not. The enshitification of its UI will get worse overtime, as happens to all for-profit tech company products, but for the time being it’s tolerable. Just don’t get too comfy.

    Overall I’d suggest Jellyfin for most in-home use cases, and if you’re comfortable managing external connections (and the security of it). If don’t have the time or knowledge to manage this beyond powering it on, open the wallet and go with Plex. But there’s no reason to pay a subscription for something your home equipment and your Internet connection are all doing on their own if you can spare a little time to set it up.



  • Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can’t be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.

    I don’t like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn’t Mozilla, it’s the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.

    What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.

    They need money. That’s it. That’s the long and short of it.


  • The bottom line is, they started something that’s bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.

    I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.

    After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it’s own without the creator’s direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.

    That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.



  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSolid advice
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    11 months ago

    Depends on your needs, I guess. I despise Microsoft with every fiber of my being, and OSX’s certainly less openly annoying, but many of the things I hate about the current trajectory of windows are straight out of Apple’s playbook.

    To put it simply, I won’t accept any platform that doesn’t respect that I’m the admin of the device. And I’m more than willing to suffer less “clean” experiences to retain this.



  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSolid advice
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    11 months ago

    Your original comment is equally as asinine, bud.

    You literally suggested Linux has not grown because of the community, as if to say every single day thousands of Windows users are booting up their first distros only to be chased away by a toxic community. The only thing holding it back from a boom in users is, what, discord channels?

    Because most people actually want to learn from people not a 10,000 word man page written by a robot

    So…users don’t want to read, and that’s somehow the Linux community’s fault? Nevermind the fact there’s plenty of very simple and short video guides to help with this.

    Look, I’m not going to convince you of anything, you’ve got your mind made up, so whatever. But you’re really reaching here to make a point without any actual evidence. At least have the decency to make some bullshit up like “I’ve spoken with a lot of people that say” or something.