DigitalAudio @ DigitalAudio @sopuli.xyz

Professional audio engineer, specialized in DSP and audio programming. I lo

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Which would be fine at all, you know. It's their platform and their servers, and they can do what they want.

Except for the fact that the official app is several orders of magnitude more primitive, inefficient and uncomfortable to use. Even more so for Android than for iOS

All my messages are still there, I just checked. But I had never even once used the chat feature, so I wouldn't even know about that.

I guess what I find odd is that it's a 7 year old game at this point

What's the deal with Mario Kart 8? Why is it so high this year? Is it the new tracks?

Chocomint supremacy

I was already using the official Reddit app, and I own being dumb as a brick.

But I still decided to leave because of the IPO, which will unavoidably make the site cater more and more to a mainstream audience until it eventually turns to shit. I call it the Instagramification of all social media.

That's why I joined and now I'm thoroughly enjoying it here.

It’s not. I’m from a third world country and almost everybody no matter what has at least a smartphone, a motorcycle, a TV and booze.

People from developed nations tend to not have the slightest understanding of what third world countries look like and generally just think of those pictures of subsaharan African children starving near huts in the savannah.

The reality of it is that living in a third world country doesn’t immediately mean you have no access to commodities or modern items. It’s not living in the past. Usually it means you have to work your ass harder than anybody in a first world country to afford some imported or more globalised items. Your labour rights are poorer, your working hours longer and your career growth more limited, but I’m sick of all the American (and to some extent European) exceptionalism where people think citizens of third world countries can’t even have a smartphone.

You can even enjoy relative luxury without being part of corrupt government circles or even rich. Like… most people can at least afford to go to vacation to national parks or popular destinations. And sure, they go by bus, or they have to save longer for it, but this notion that third world citizens are necessarily in a constant state of misery and extreme poverty is actually quite harmful. It prevents professionals and highly qualified workers from being taken seriously or from getting rid of negative stigma surrounding their country of origin.

A lot of people get paid by hours worked so not showing up means a lower monthly income. And hourly contracts don’t have sick leave in many cases. At least in several countries around the world.

I’ve never cared for furry stuff, but hell, I probably would’ve stayed if I’d gotten anything nearly as hilarious as “werewolf breeding zone” instead of all the religious and techbro crap I was getting through their ads.

Sounds like a universal experience for pretty much all fields of work.

Government and policy? Climate change? A fucking pandemic?!

We’ve seen it all happen time and time again. People in positions of authority get overconfident that if things are working right now, they’ll keep working indefinitely. And then despite being warned for decades, when things finally break, they’ll claim no one could have foreseen the consequences of their lack of responsibility. Some people will even chime in and begin theorising that surely, those that warned them, had to be responsible for all the chaos. It was an act of sabotage, and not of foresight.

Yeah same. I’ve lived most of my life surrounded by cats, and I thought they were enough until I moved in with my partner+dog, and I realised I was wrong. Now I’m 100% a dog person, though I still enjoy a cat’s company, but it’s just not the same.

I think you’re being downvoted more because of your attitude than your points, to be honest. Which isn’t necessarily Reddit bullshit, and just seems like a normal reaction.

That being said, I think a community doesn’t necessarily need to strive for eternal growth and mainstream appeal. Lemmy and the Fediverse isn’t exactly mainstream-friendly to begin with, with how confusing the whole federation concept can be to new users, and how unstable it is by nature (an instance can collapse on a whim, taking down all of its users with it).

The real question I have would be: what should be more important to these communities, keeping up growth as a priority, or focusing on the type of space that is being built instead? In a way, opening the door to Meta and other large corporate instances does have the potential to change the nature of this community, and will inevitably lead to a massive influx of users. But maybe that’s not necessarily what the community wants or needs right now.

I don’t believe in alienating Meta simply because “corporate bad”, but perhaps growth shouldn’t be a non-commercial venture’s end-all be-all. That need for eternal growth is exactly what has made plenty of social networks become hellholes devoid of any personality. Meanwhile, I’ve seen many Internet forums that never strived for mainstream appeal, and instead kept a moderately-sized and engaged userbase. It wasn’t hermetic enough to alienate new users, but also it wasn’t large enough to deplete all sense of community and civility.

I think my main issue with a potential federation with Meta isn’t that they’ll approach our communities from an exploitative perspective (like you said, they can do that anyway), but rather that most of the communities will crumble under the pressure of the massive scale of a Mainstream network. None is ready for moderating the potential huge influx of users. A lot of servers aren’t ready to handle that level of activity.

I think this is a lose-lose situation, though. Federate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of collapsing, but defederate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of falling to irrelevancy. Right now the existing communities should be focused on becoming their own thing and having their own attractive that can survive without depending on mainstream appeal. Mainly because most of them probably wouldn’t even be able to handle mainstream appeal.

There are a few key things that you’d notice between high quality and very low quality audio. Mostly, a loss of information, which would result in a muffled audio, a lack of crispy sounds and a loss of general clarity, as well as unpleasant distortion and other made-up noise at worst.

For 99.9% of people, it’s not really an mp3 vs wav/aiff comparison, but rather a kbps comparison. High quality mp3 (320kbps) is usually indistinguishable from lossless formats for most people.

For a good reasonable idea, compare 128kbps vs 320kbps at the bottom of this page and pay attention to the cymbals and other high-pitched sounds. You should notice that 128kbps sounds a bit more opaque, like it loses a lot of its spark, whereas 320 sounds crisp and clearer.

That being said, it’s not a huge difference unless you go below 128, and there’s no point in listening to wav and lossless files if you use Bluetooth, since Bluetooth hard-caps all your rates at 320kbps anyway. But I think it’s fairly noticeable anyway.

I’m pretty sure they can, they just don’t know it. It’s extremely obvious.