Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers’ minds, to reverse course. It’s the intended outcome.

    Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.

    Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a “spend money” button that players hit over and over again. That’s the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They’re all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.








  • I like the “antennas” feature a lot

    For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

    From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.


  • Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.

    No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”





  • That’s just the system. This is what happens when people confuse commerce with capitalism: They think that capitalism is being rewarded for doing commerce better. Instead, capitalism is about leveraging ownership of property and underpaying workers in order to get money for free.

    And the thing about money is that it’s really just a proxy for power. When you only have enough of it to eek out a comfortable life (or less), you don’t really notice, because all of your power goes in to achieving or maintaining that acceptably good life (or hanging on for dear life trying to survive), but once your needs are comfortably and handidly met, money is entirely about being able to make other people do whatever you want. And the more money you have, the more things you can get them to do, or the more of them that you can get to do what you want.

    And if you’ve managed to be one of the lucky ones who just get free money for owning shit, then you have the power at your fingertips to try to grow your power over others exponentially, while still doing no honest work in your days. And if you’re a shitty person who gets off on all of this, that’s exactly what you’ll do.

    The wealthy are insufferably greedy leeching assholes because one does not become wealthy without being greedy, leeching off of others, and being an insufferable asshole.




  • Here’s the thing, though: Whenever you have a position like “Person for Group”, that Group is being singled out for a reason.

    And that reason is lack of representation.

    To put it another way, so have a Minister for Women is a tacit acknowledgement that the others operate as if men are the default person. All of the other ministers are Ministers for Men.



  • If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.

    Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.