shrugal
@shrugal@lemm.ee
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 26th 6 months ago:
Trying to finish the HFW story, but it’s a bit meh. Really sad about that! The HZD stories were great, and the world is as beautiful as ever, but I stopped caring at some point with the newest one. Other than that I just bought the AoW 4 expansion pass and am trying out the new races and traits.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
Nothing about what you just wrote has anything to do with closed source software. You could just as well say that closed source helps them predict the future or draw shinier unicorns. It doesn’t!
Maybe you mean tightly coupled, stripped-down, preconfigured or vertically integrated, but you can do that just as well with open source software. No one is forcing them to make a general purpose chat app or offer the ability to choose a different server. It’s just a matter of being able to see, verify and modify the code.
differentiate above the competition […] charging for it
This is the only thing that comes close imo. But they stated specifically that they don’t want to make money with the app itself, so it doesn’t really work as a justification. They could easily offer server-side premium features or create a closed source premium-only version or extension, it’s no reason to make the base app itself closed source.
security theatre
They don’t have to do that, and they don’t afaik. Matrix itself can do proper e2ee just fine, and Beeper is pretty open about the fact that bridges hosted by them have to break e2ee to translate between platforms. They’d only need theater if their closed source app actually has some bad code in it, which is kind of my point.
Expanding to selling some user metadata, or sniffing the bridges, would be an extra
Again: Their Matrix server and bridges are open source right now, and it wouldn’t stop them from doing what you’re describing.
Too pedantic 😉
I just can’t help it. 😜
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
the connecting with a majority of people using the same closed source platform
The platform is open, including the part that connects to other closed source platforms. It’s just Matrix and open source bridges after all. And making the client app closed souce doesn’t help with any of that.
I’m sorry if I’m a bit pedantic about this, but it seems like you’re describing an upside to closed source software that’s just not there.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
You’re definitely right that people are a bit too doom-and-gloom about it, they did do a lot of good over the last few years!
But I also find it a bit odd that Beeper talks so much about the importance of open source in messaging, and then releases a closed source client without at least adressing the topic. Add the fact that they’ve been aquired by another company on the same day, and it starts to smell like another instance of openwashing.
Idk, we’ll have to see how it plays out I guess.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
I can answer that: it’s the “I don’t care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people” experience.
Closed source doesn’t help with that though, you don’t have to care about privacy in open source.
except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway
They are working on on-device bridges that preserve e2ee, but making the client closed source kind of defeats the purpose here.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
The thing is, we are talking about the Beeper service here. Yes Matrix is good, yes Beeper bridges are good, but a closed source Beeper app is bad. That’s what the criticism is about, and it doesn’t help if you deflect that by arguing about all the other things they are doing.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
That’s not the point.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
What is this “closed source experience” you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, when their stated goals is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!
Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don’t really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I’m actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.
- Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist! 8 months ago:
This is not applicable here, since Beeper is “just” Matrix + Bridges + Simplified UX!
- Comment on To be fair, that's more than two words 8 months ago:
It works best with nouns, we even use suffixes like -ung and -heit to turn other words into nouns first.
- Comment on Thoughts on the game Timberborn 8 months ago:
Definitely! I think my real criticism here is that there’s no new survival mechanic to replace the challenge of supplying and storing enough water.
- Comment on Thoughts on the game Timberborn 8 months ago:
It’s reeeaaally good imo, but also a freaking time machine. You start to play it, and 1 hour later you traveled like 10 hours into the future.
To be a bit more serious, the game has a very nice and cozy vibe, an interesting construction system with buildings on top of other buildings and intricate road and energy transmission planning, great water mechanics, and a good economy and survival loop. You can spend hours trying to figure out an optimal way to stack and connect certain builds, and you have to be really careful about when to expand, cut back, or build more production and storage, because the next drought or bad water season could very well be your last!
One thing I really don’t like is that you kinda have to play it with the time sped up, because many things just take a ridiculously long time to build. It also gets much easier once you manage to get your water supply under control, almost nullifying the survival mechanics.
- Comment on How do I "ls -R | cat | grep print" ? 11 months ago:
I think you can just do
grep print **/*. - Comment on Is there a timeline/plan for lemm.ee to upgrade to 0.19? 1 year ago:
The latest stable release is still 0.18.5.
- Comment on So true 1 year ago:
Odd and even (aka parity) is only defined for integers.
- Comment on An EXTRA Hour! 1 year ago:
Wouldn’t mind doing it again this weekend.
- Comment on What makes this website resistant to enshitrification? 1 year ago:
Talking about exponential growth in the early phase makes even less sense, because exponential curves actually grow very slowly at the beginning while projects usually start out with substantial initial costs to get things going. And nothing about the way Lemmy is run indicates that it won’t flatten out or doesn’t flatten out already, I really have no idea why you would think that.
- Comment on What makes this website resistant to enshitrification? 1 year ago:
Yea but that’s not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. So the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
- Comment on What makes this website resistant to enshitrification? 1 year ago:
That’s why adding the ability to move accounts and entire communities between instances should be a top priority imo.
- Comment on What makes this website resistant to enshitrification? 1 year ago:
The Power law strikes again.
- Comment on What makes this website resistant to enshitrification? 1 year ago:
Uhm… costs don’t rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don’t have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
- Comment on Why cant the Middle East just chill out? 1 year ago:
One highly significant area for three different world religions means there will always be religious fundamentalists who want to throw out the other two.
- Comment on Billionaire grindset 1 year ago:
IQ follows a normal distribution, so there is no difference.
- Comment on Reddit is a shithole 1 year ago:
Then it’s only changed on their instance. They’d need to create fake users and send votes for them. At that point others should be able to detect it as botting, at least if the impact is big enough.
- Comment on Here we go again 1 year ago:
Appart from privacy concerns, Google has started to add some really bad features to Chrome, such as “Manifest V3” and “Web Environment Integrity”. These limit you ability to block ads or generally modify the websites you’re visiting, and are just a bad for the web as a whole. But as long as the majority of people keep using Chrome they can just force these things onto everyone.