I agree that this is needlessly nuanced, but it is possible. If you have a Mac you can transfer files between Mac and an iPad wirelessly or with a cable. iPads can also connect to external storage devices or Windows PCs if they are sharing the files. But it isn’t like Android where you can basically just plug it into a Windows or Linux machine and have direct instant access to its entire directory.

A bit pedantic, but it is also industry leading in revenue/profit. Even in Europe and parts of Asia. A first glance it is a pretty “duh” statement. But companies, like Samsung, see Apple’s price action and then move in unison toward it. Sure, you can get plenty of phones for relatively cheap these days. Often times with huge drawbacks or a lot of additional spying built in (or “features” like advertisements in notifications). Or you pay for it in other ways, such as not receiving more than a year’s worth of updates.

I feel this as well. I’m in a mixed device household, and sharing images and videos between each other is a real pain. Nobody wants to mess around with going to an iCloud or Google Photos link and grabbing images or video. In the USA, few people want to use third party messaging apps. My family certainly doesn’t. My kid’s friends certainly don’t, and so everyone sticks to iMessage.

Because iMessage really is the best in this region given what is actually used by non-outliers. I use both Android and iOS, Windows and Mac. There’s no comparison. iMessage has more features than Google’s solution. Google’s “RCS” is better than SMS/MMS but isn’t equivalent to iMessage. And cross-device support for it is a joke. Samsung has their own little bridge if you buy entirely into their ecosystem–apps included (sorry, Google Messenger). But there isn’t the same identical experience that happens like with Apple: iMessage on iPhone is the same as on iPad is the same as on Mac. No web QR codes to scan, no weird per-device limitations, it really just works. Handoff works like magic. I know, cliche, but Google doesn’t have anything that competes with the feature set. iMessage is so much more than group chats and text messages and pictures like Android users tend to characterize.

Google has no room to call out Apple for its b.s. with iMessage, either; Google has its own proprietary messaging apps. They’ve tried several times to replicate iMessage and lock people in. Their latest is RCS, which is really a misnomer because Google took the actual RCS standard and made it proprietary. That’s why there aren’t third party apps outside of a tiny number of outliers with special business arrangements with Google (such as Samsung). That’s why Google’s entire campaign to “shame” Apple (really, remind iPhone users of the pain of interacting with Android users) doesn’t go anywhere. Google is just as proprietary as iMessage. Google requires all traffic route through Google’s proprietary Jibe middleware and cloud infrastructure.

At this point I doubt Google would actually share their proprietary RCS with Apple given that they don’t share it with anyone else except Samsung, and only then because Samsung was moving to fork Android (or abandon it entirely) after Google got into the hardware business. We know Google has a private API for their RCS implementation and that they actively choose not to share it, because they’ve accidentally leaked it before and XDA devs picked up on it. There are a million SMS/MMS apps available, not so much for “RCS.”

People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that’s the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn’t or can’t pay the price. But software development is hard work, especially if it isn’t a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That’s the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can’t throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.

I’ll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn’t like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn’t like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.

Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.

It all depends on your tolerance.

FireSticks are inherently easier to tinker with. But Amazon bends you over with shoving ads and spyware up your ass at every opportunity. It is baked into the UI design itself. It is very advertising-forward, with everything else designed around ads. And even the 4K max lags at times.

AppleTV really requires an iPhone to set up optimally. And it is locked down with no clear jail break at this time for most people unless you’re willing to solder (or if I’ve missed a new flaw in an update which opened the door programmatically). But Apple TV is fast and smooth, with no inherent ads of its own. It is honestly over powered for its purpose, probably because it can also play a fair number of iOS games.

Chrome Cast with Google TV is a fucking mess. It is severely under powered to the point of lagging. It has half baked ideas like profiles which don’t change anything. And it has ads as the focus of the design just like FireStick.

But you’re going to pay a subscription if you go with Apple TV and want something like Infuse. Jellyfin and Plex, of course, don’t require it.

And despite what people say, Stremio is absolute dogshit on a FireStick because of its mobile-centric UI.

If you plan to use a server like Plex and Jellyfin, all of them work—but Apple TV works best. If you need anything else out of it, probably the fire stick if you use a pihole to stop it from phoning home for more ads constantly.

Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.

Like tablet-friendly UI.

And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.

Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.

Adding onto that, the quality of Reddit content [in my former subreddits] has slid dramatically in my opinion. Sure, those niche communities will exist and persist for a while. But, as more tech pros move to the Fediverse I have to imagine that is where a lot of information will reside going forward. Hopefully it becomes or remains discoverable. I get some glimmers of this happening with the various Steam Deck communities here. It is already happening with the various programming communities.

I think a far more likely thing to happen is that you get people scrapping the Fediverse for content to repost on Reddit, like what happens with Facebook and Instagram users scraping TikTok for content to repost. Social networks these days seem surprisingly sticky now that it isn’t just a place where all your friends are at.

There are already some bots that essentially do that (perhaps not with that particular approach). Unfortunately, I think it has the opposite intended effect: organic growth doesn’t seem to take all that well.

Here’s the post from the official Calckey account. Mali is, indeed, seizing domain names. Makes me wonder what is happening with Lemmy.ml. I really don’t want to get involved with Matrix just to find out.

LemmyGrad.ml is still up, though. For now.

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.

A huge component of the fear that I’ve seen is how one large player can usurp standards. It keeps happening. Why do you think Meta reached out to some of the largest people in the Fediverse and tried (pretty successfully) to get them to sign NDAs? Only one stood their ground and went transparent about it, and that was Kev at Fossotodn.

I don’t think valid opposition needs to assume some grand evil plan to destroy the Fediverse from Meta. Meta’s mere presence is enough to threaten the standard and our communities, good intentions or otherwise.

A lot of “Reporters” are just influencers at this point. They mostly stuck with Twitter so they could maintain their reach essentially.

Now Threads is out, and all these writers are flocking there and won’t shut the fuck up about it. Just yesterday TheVerge had like 7 out of 10 stories dedicated to Threads. It was all over my news feed elsewhere, too. Journalists I follow on Mastodon also won’t shut the fuck up about it in an attempt to port some users over to Threads.

Same with TikTok creators. Even FOSS (supposedly) enthusiasts are hiding behind this aura of “evangelizing” the Fediverse to Threads users as their reason for being there. But they are trying very hard to get their followers to also follow them on threads.

I agree in spirit, but Meta is a known bad actor and wrecking ball that ran actual psyops against its own users and their networks just to see if they could make people depressed. They also engage in extensive, worldwide election interference to upend democracies. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

This article lays out all the problems with the wait and see approach. We’ve been here before, unfortunately, and it only has a happy ending for the huge corporations looking to end us.

Edit: for those looking to get away from Mastodon’s main instances, give Fosstodon a look. Meta approached its admin with NDAs just like they did with Ruud, but refused it and published the email for openness. Here it is, by the way.

I’m positive that most of that reporting is outrage farming and anecdotes. Take the really famous example—people not dating people if they use an Android device. It originated with the NYPost. The NYPost is a rightwing gossip and conspiracy rag that makes its money with outrage farming.

And other outlets just uncritically picked it up and went with it. Now it is part of the assumed zeitgeist.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it happens. My Android-using family needles me constantly for using an iPhone and Macs. It is very annoying. But it isn’t exclusionary.

What’s exclusionary are what Apple and Meta do with iMessage and Whatsapp, respectively, and what Google does with what they call “RCS,” which is actually a proprietary fork of RCS entirely reliant on their proprietary middleware such that Google can gate keep (which is why there aren’t a slew of RCS apps out there; Google doesn’t allow access just like Apple doesn’t). These companies need to be broken up and whatever remains should be forced to create/adopt a standard and stick to it.

I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.

A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.

The good news is that I think Gavin may have already fixed it. I’m using the latest TestFlight build. Gavin said he submitted it to the AppStore just maybe 20 minutes ago, so fingers crossed.

There’s also a new neat app icon.

In Liftoff, click the magnifying glass at the bottom of the app.

Enter the term you want to search for in the top box.

You can then pick which server/instance you would like to search.

Tap the search button, then tap “Communities” at the top of the app.

Well, fair enough point. But Google is preparing to actually become actionable and start issuing sweeping user bans.

I’m a dev. I know people who’ve run afoul of Google and had their accounts banned. They lose access to everything with zero recourse.

And it means they have to find new jobs because enterprise Google accounts are also affected. Especially if they are Android developers.

Google also has methods to trace people down if they make new accounts. That presumably extends to people accessing information without accounts. People are incredibly easy to finger print with just their browser and all the data it surrenders as a standard.

I’m not OP, but a big one was breaking a fair number of extensions/add-ons with a major browser update. I forget the exact details, and am not privy to the technical arguments within Mozilla, but I can see how it is a huge turn off for users.

FireFox was also extremely resource intensive at one point.

And their mobile apps are stubbornly bad. There’s no reason not to implement a real tab bar, for example. Card view is terrible on tablet devices.

It just seems like there are a lot of little things they do with FireFox.

Still, it isn’t FireFox trying to end adblocking and start blacklisting people from using services with no actual alternative.

Alphabet needs to be broken up, as does Microsoft and Apple.