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.

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.

For the time being the bot account flag is voluntary anyway, so there’s nothing stopping a repost bot from not indicating they are one.

Block and move on is the most straightforward solution at the moment.

I do not as this is not my expertise. In general though, reaching out to specialty academic/medical units are usually a great first step for pursuing something particularly esoteric.

Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it’s not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn’t ideal.

If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

This comment isn’t to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.

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.

Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.

From my PoV:

1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it’s very easy to consume content
2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there’s a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it’s a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That’s understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

The generic stuff that has a broad common denominator will easily take hold on Lemmy as they would in any growing community (like shitposts, question threads, gaming, technology, news, image focused communities and so on).

The niche stuff will take a while to grow, more so as the niche subs are those less likely to move from Reddit (or already have communities like Discord that they retreat to). More specific communities will need to build a new base here unfortunately.

Time will tell; it’s not been that long.

In many cases it’s a numbers game. Not a bad idea to connect with old colleagues or acquaintances, or to network with current or recent ones.

The unfortunate reality is the job market is kind of awful right now, insofar as the experience is for someone looking, so you run better odds leveraging who you know.

Specialized job boards are particularly great places to target (for example, postings at large public or private institutions nearby instead of generic job boards).

Yea unfortunately the nature of Federation means that instances (servers) are dissociated from each other but nonetheless communicate with each other via a standardized protocol. Consequently, there is nothing stopping one instance from saying they want to stop communicating with another instance

In some situations that makes sense. For example, if you are running an instance and don’t want to get people/content from another instance that posts incredibly hateful messages, you can choose to defederate from that instance.

In other situations it creates complications. For example, if you are on a somewhat popular instance (like Lemmy.world) but then get defederated from an instance you want to participate in (like Beehaw.org), even if the defederation came from justifiable reasons, you will need a Beehaw account in order to view that content as you won’t be able to access new content from Beehaw.org using your Lemmy.world account.

For the most part, in pragmatic terms what this really means is if one wants to participate in the most active instances, they’ll probably want an account on an instance that federates with the biggest instances.

Due to the nature of Federation, don’t hesitate to make accounts on different instances as needed to access that instance’s content. I reckon a number of people have accounts on Beehaw and accounts elsewhere.

Being “open source” seems to be lead people to think it is altruistic or good for the community as a whole.

Being open source is really just a categorization. A fully for profit organization can make something valuable open source and then leverage that for commercial reasons (like building highly monetized additional code on top).

It is in Google’s best interests for Chromium to dominate the web even if it is open source due to Chrome’s broad reach and Google’s heavy leverage of the web for revenue, like its ad services.

It is shortsighted to see what is happening and then go “well I don’t see a problem”.

In addition to the Octopath mention, the Xenoblade Chronicles games have some absolutely stellar soundtracks.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has a night theme and day theme for each individual large area, and there are a lot of them, alongside a variety of battle music, insert tracks, and more. Each of the night/day themes share overlapping motifs, alongside motifs reflective of the larger music work as a whole.