Doesn’t scratch the same itch yet. I have to cheat and go check out reddit every now and then.

be on kbin instead.

sneak in more reddit for niche subs.

set up an rss reader again.

find more discord communities.

turn off my phone earlier at night.

Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.

M$ is a 2.5 trilion dollar company that can’t manage game studios because it’s not one of their core competencies. They prop up their failed xbox gaming division with enterprise sales and cloud computing. I honestly don’t think M$ even cares about xbox as a console; it’s just a vehicle for cloud gaming, subscriptions, and a way to ensure developers also develop for PC/Windows.

M$ is looking long term. They can afford to bleed money for another 5 to 10 years, as long as they buy brands/studios with influence; they’ll try to condition the next generation of kids to accept subscriptions and live-service games. It’s the worst of worlds; a regular gaming company would be forced to innovate, restructure, or sell itself–xbox can just fail and instead of improving internally, they have unlimited non-xbox money to spend.

I also think xbox, even failing, is just a marketing vehicle for M$. They want to influence kids and teens into associating M$ with cool things. They’ve failed to produce any games (yet) to compete with Sony this generation, so their last ditch effort is to just buy a studio with mindshare. You’ll never hear a straight answer as to how much money xbox is losing, because they probably hide it behind some cloud/services or marketing account.

There is one way I’d be okay with M$ buying Activision Blizzard: they need to spin off the xbox brand into it’s own company and let it stand on its own. Then, we’ll see if the company is really viable as its own entity or if its just a money-losing strategic brand for M$.