Gone Home is pretty neat. I usually need secondary gameplay loop to placate my short attention span but this one gripped me through presentation and atmosphere alone.

Honestly I'm glad they didn't go through the rtwp route. I have the suspicion that it's just really hard and not worth it to balance both playstyles, because it's often both too easy yet tedious to frequently pause every combat but also too mentally taxing to keep track of the 10-50 person fight in realtime including gear switching, buffs, consumables, cooldowns, etc. Just my experience but I'd rather they just stick to one or the other and design around just that.

Not game-specific but those types of games certainly were a big factor.
I used to love playing with my school friends. Yet slowly but surely they became very toxic to play with as they became bitter in adulthood. Now I only play single player and stick to text chats with them.

yup, this hits the nail on the head for me. I consider myself very tech literate; I am my family's IT guy. I even have Mint installed in a separate drive but I seldom use it unless I have nothing else to do for an afternoon. And the reason is that the more I know about windows (be it editing the registry, troubleshooting services, learning diagnostics tools...) the less comparatively capable I feel in a linux environment. It's like moving countries after I spent my whole life learning this city and I could't even speak my native language anymore. Yeah I know it works out of the box and there's wine and I can make my UX the same. But, going back to my metaphor, that feels like moving to a different country and just not leaving my house and only talking to the people I knew back home. Yeah it would be the same if I severely constrict my comfort zone. You just have to learn a bunch of new shit and leave all you know behind and that's just one distro. Because YEAH linux isn't an OS it's a whole family of operating systems. The nerd yelling that it's a kernel is right in the worst way possible. I can learn Mint but I can form an opinion on Linux because I still wouldn't know shit about Arch or Fedora or Gentoo or what-have-you. It's all very daunting and what I have is functional. No, not "functional enough". This does literally everything I want in less than 4 clicks, everything is plug-and-play, everything works out of the box (and if it doesn't you're sure as shit it wouldn't work out of the box on linux), my knowledge on windows is applicable on every machine I find, it's the system everyone expects me to have (I'm fucking sure the software my uni made me install for online tests wouldn't have a Linux installer). It's not just that the path of least resistance points to mac/windows, Linux as a whole also has very potent repelling field. I still want to learn it but not because I see any practical value/utility in it.

my guess is that they were working on it in the background and when musk bought tw they started pouring way more resources into it and turned it into a standalone app

Yeah I never really got the notes system especially reblogs. It makes sense when a tumblr screenshot gets posted online, it just looks like a reply chain. But when I tried to use the site myself (it was 10 years ago tbf) I never got anywhere and I couldn't find the funny.

I supposed I would make some mistake talking about xmpp since I never used it. Oh well, thanks for the clarification.

they need us, not the other way around.

Yeah, until they get a foot on the door. A single foot of theirs is stronger than the whole fediverse. Google used the depend on the android open source project. Then AOSP depended on google. Then they started phasing out base apps like email, browser, gallery, sms/phone, calendar, file manager, music player, etc., in favor of proprietary google apps and made everything require google play services. Other vendors stopped using the AOSP apps as well, and made their own versions in response, up to and including entire app stores like samsung apps. Today most users only know the proprietary android experience, even the UI is proprietary (android ONE, pixel UI, MIUI, etc). Even open source enthusiasts have a hard time installing AOSP or a custom ROM because of hardware level locked bootloaders. Others have mentioned the embrace-extend-extinguish tactic and this is what it is.

It's not even about morality. It's a dumb law that doesn't protect users most at risk—even if enforced—while making it incredibly convoluted and awkward for everyone else.

On second thought, that second part was probably the point.

you’re blaming the medium

I don't think that's implied in the post. Also reddit inc is complicit in the bot farming since it boosts their engagement metrics.

My username is usually available everywhere and I'm content with it, but I'm happy for you guys