Raven FellBlade

Zero… point… zero.

Bad Moopsy! Leave Bones alone!

Ray? Ray…

Glory!

This

“Wrote a wrapper”. Oh, is that all? It’s just that easy, huh?

Then why can none of these FOSS apps deliver the same experience, if Dawson is such an untalented hack?

You either have no clue of what you’re talking about, or you’re a troll. From my perspective, there is no substantive difference. If it’s such an easy shtick, the do it yourself, and do a better job. Put up, or shut up. Nobody asked for your respect, and I’m certain you know precisely where you can shove it.

It comes from a ten year period of distro-hopping a dozen different Linux distros that ultimately all fell short of delivering an experience anywhere near as stable or reliable as Windows or Mac OS. The closest I got to that was Mint, which I ended up using from Mint 9 thru Mint 17. And then the drivers for my nVidia graphics card just…broke. I had my laptop set up as a dual boot, and until that driver mess, rarely ever booted Windows. After the driver busted, I found myself having less and less interest in spending ungodly hours trying to coax some other distro into cooperating (Ubuntu, Pentoo, Kali, Knoppix). Every distro would have some kind of conflict or missing libs or some other issue requiring hours of fixing config files or finding exactly the correct repo to install from so as not to break compatibility with something else. It just got exhausting, like having a second job just to maintain a functioning desktop that wasn’t full of obsolete or deprecated software. Mind you, I gave up back in 2015. I did wonder if I should have given LM 18 a try when it came out about a year later, but by then, I had largely just moved on from PCs as an interest altogether. I just didn’t have the budget to keep up with hardware, and my job as an over the road driver at a time lent itself to portable gaming and consoles. I couldn’t justify spending another 2 grand on another laptop that would be obsolete in two or three years.

So yes, it is my own experience with FOSS software, and lots and lots of it, and all of the headaches that went along with it. I absolutely adored Mint when it worked. It’s just too bad that that only lasted a couple years, at least for me.

From the perspective of someone who isn’t currently in the “Bad If Not FOSS” mindset, this image really gets the impression backwards. To the average user who doesn’t appreciate the user-unfriendly klunk and jank that is inherent to FOSS interfaces, it really feels like the image should depict a bunch of FOSS Teletubbies being intruded upon by a competent Power Ranger.

I used to be a FOSS guy. And then I realized I valued my time and sanity way too much to spend more time troubleshooting and nudging my software into just working normally than I did actually using it.

FOSS software as the underpinning of the platform that is then accessed by a closed-source client is, ultimately, the best circumstance we could ask for. Clients are what the user actually interacts with. If that experience is more engaging and approachable, you get many more users on the platform overall, without threatening the sanctity of the freedom of the FOSS platform it all runs on. There is no one authority to make unilateral decisions to derail the platform, while still offering a more welcoming public face. If you can’t understand that, or don’t care to recognize it, that you’re content to let the platform wallow in obscurity.

It’s amazing how divorced from reality the FOSS obsessed can be whenever anyone mentions non-FOSS apps. Nobody is bending over backwards, and nobody is sucking anyone’s schlong. If Sync were to have been FOSS, you’d be first in line to sing its praises. This trollish behavior doesn’t win anyone over to the “All Software Must Be Foss” camp at all. Must be a PC Master Race thing.

Your comment misses the very important point that nobody who experienced this issue had the clairvoyance to screenshot their cleared profile on Day A to prove that their comments were restored on Day B, C, or D. You’re expecting someone to have explicitly predicted that exact circumstance and deliberately documented it before it ever happened to them. That’s like complaining to your neighbor they they can’t prove the scratch wasn’t already in their car door after they watch you hit it with your own.

This is almost poetry. Love it!

Here’s my example: I subscribed to Paramount Plus explicitly for Star Trek content. The week I subscribed, they pulled all of the non-Abrams films. So I got to watching other stuff. Eventually, they brought all of the films back. Cool, right?

So I finally get around to Prodigy, a show made for Paramount Plus. Two episodes in, and it vanishes. No announcements or warnings that that show was just going to disappear. It’s gone. Because “it wasn’t popular enough”. A show that only existed on that one platform was pulled off of that platform with absolutely no other legal way to view it. Content that I specifically signed up for that platform to see, and now I can’t… legally. Yo ho, yo ho, me hardies.

I’m learning a lot about that. I find it refreshing to be on a platform built around ensuring both the safety and visibility of queer voices. While parts of Reddit definitely felt that way, recent history has made it very clear that that’s subject to change, and Reddit is swerving aggressively right.

I feel like this question might be missing a bigger picture: What’s going on with the Internet?

Facebook/Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are all owned by people in the US. We’ve seen in tbr past few election cycles that Twitter and Reddit in particular were vitally important to progressive movements in the US, while Facebook largely sat by unperturbed as their platform was used to plaster right-wing disinformation in every corner of the internet they could reach. Now, as another election cycle is gearing up, we see Twitter and Reddit doing things that make NO SENSE for a business, but make PERFECT SENSE if you were a MAGA nut trying to take over or dismantle a successful progressive platform, at the same time as you have Meta moving to infect and corrupt the one significant platform that offers a great alternative to both Twitter and Reddit.

I’m not usually a conspiracy minded person, but the more I think about it, the more I conclude that this is the only explanation that can make any sense of Elon and (fuck)u/Spez deliberately imploding their platforms. When you factor in that both of them seem to also be encouraging right-wing provocateurs to return to their platforms while wholesale silencing any progressive dissent… this is a coordinated assault meant explicitly to tamper with the US political system while also driving right-wing fascism abroad.

Do NOT allow Meta access. At this point, I’m not sure why the license doesn’t explicitly blacklist specific bad actors like Meta from using the ActivityPub software in the first place.