Everyone going mad and many suggesting “if you have it use Safari instead!” when Apple implemented essentially this same thing quite some time ago in Safari 🤔

That said intentions are important. I have little faith that Big G’s goal is anything other than self servin.

While I don’t disagree, YouTube won’t care. Currently folk like you and I who evade their ads are freeloading. We get all the content and YouTube gets nothing in return. Having those who block ads abandon watching doesn’t lose YouTube anything, and maybe saves them a little bandwidth bill I guess?

I think it also fundamentally changes the conversation. Valid but “unpopular” comments can’t get buried in downvotes. The voting system on Reddit was based on a sane logic that totally neglected to consider how people actually behave… the idea of up and down votes to crowd-source relevance and quality of content makes sense, but all anyone did was use it as an agree / disagree button which broke the idea entirely.

If A goes down or if I lose interest in it, I’ll need to re-establish somewhere else and resubscribe everything

Correct, as of now, but the point is that you can resub elsewhere. This is entirely impossible on centralised private platforms like Reddit.

It’s something of a manual process for Lemmy right now, you’d need to set up on another server and manually add your communities but the point is you can still “move home” and still interact with the same communities and people. If you don’t like having your stuff on Reddit, on the other hand, your options are put up with it or no longer be able to be part of that community.

So if you join a fediverse server of any flavour and the admins reveal themselves to have view incompatible with your own, or the server goes to shit, or it just has to shut down due to lack of funds or whatever you don’t get locked out of the places you have been hanging out in.

Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.

It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.

So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)

I’m pretty uneasy about the association, but the attitude of Beehaw is the antithesis of it so I guess it balances out…?

I did play with Kbin first but the interface felt kinda broken to me, buttons not reacting and the like…

We had a Google speaker thing. Got rid of it because it was crap. All we could reliably use it for was asking it to play a radio station or play Spotify, but frankly it even got that wrong enough that grabbing my phone and connecting to the Bluetooth speaker was easier.

Even privacy invading problems aside they’re just a little bit rubbish.

Sounds like a really bad experience 😞

The real danger here is if , in the process of putting the PC together, you accidentally damaged something causing the problems. I once built a PC and totally forgot to put the risers between the motherboard and the case. Turned it on and FZZT… short circuited the entire damn thing. Totally unresponsive. Somehow with incredible luck the board had some sort of protection against this and once the risers were in it turned on OK - but had that not been the case I would have totally been on the hook for the cost of the whole machine…

I sincerely hope your situation is different and you get a refund! Let us know how it goes :)

Seems a fair balance!

I like the idea of Downvotes. The principle was a good one but it neglected to consider that people, on the whole, don’t look at vote buttons as up vote = relevant content downvote = irrelevant (their original intention, essentially crowdsourcing moderation / content quality control). Rather they look at them as agree / disagree, like / dislike.

I’m the end I think they hurt the conversation. People can just downvote with ease instead of having to put the effort in the say something, leaving that space for those who had a strong enough drive to be snippy or nasty to full it.

Upvote only still allows a mark of quality / relevance from the community without making it so divisive.

Absolutely. They’re great for when you don’t need to federate and just need a place to chat and share with a given community or set of friends.

I hope more come back. I’ve recently joined https://ukretro.online/forum/ and while it’s slow going I hope it gathers up a little community there.

Forums can be great, fairly easy to manage, spaces for people to gather in a way that they control and own. Even out here in fedi we don’t (most of us) control or own the servers we’re using and running mastodon etc… isn’t especially cheap. PHPbb needs chuff all server to run so it very very affordable to run as a personal thing.

it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise

While true, between this and the Twitter fallout I’m hoping more people are seeing the folly of making dependencies of centralised services that they do not own and have zero sway over management decisions of.

There were many people pleading with folk to stay on Twitter because of the communities they had built or the activist work they had been achieving… but that was all built on a house of cards.

Now is the time to do the work to shift away from depending on platforms that don’t care about their users real needs & embrace a better way of being!

I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here 😂