I'm a bit too young to remember the Spectrum but it was the N64 era that did it for me - Rare made the best games. Shame they practically disappeared after the Microsoft takeover.
It works fine for me. There was little to lose from Reddit at that point anyway because the quality had already gone through the floor. This was the catalyst to make people wake up and leave.
there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
I'd argue that's a good thing, I'd rather have posts that aren't shit.
Unfortunately that is starting to seep back in here now.
Just be careful because just because ads aren't intrusive doesn't mean they don't track you. If ads were hosted locally on a website and not part of a big ad network then ad-blockers would be pretty ineffective anyway.
There may have always been sites with ads, but they didn't always track and profile you behind your back - that's what's wrong with online ads, not that there's something wrong with advertising per se.
At least they’re personalized now
And if they're personalised then that's a whole level worse because that means that A: they've profiled you and B: they can now be much more effective at influencing you. Don't buy the story that any of that is for your benefit.
I'm not getting any of that stuff because I don't subscribe to communities that allow that stuff.
I've just taken a look at the "all" tab for the first time and I agree it's horrendous - but it was like that on Reddit as well, I think the solution is to only subscribe to what you're interested in.
Keeping it simple, I take a functional approach to my phone.
It's KISS Launcher, and defaults to most other things. The app list is in order of last used from the bottom, except for the ones I have pinned as icons above the search bar.
This doesn't answer your question properly, but a few years ago when I moved away from the YouTube front end (I use FreeTube primarily), like you I initially missed the recommendation algorithm (more than I thought). But the longer I went without it, I realised that the recommendations were really fuelling a kind of mindless addiction, eventually I started to watch fewer but higher quality videos, usually based on what other humans had recommended to me and I've found that to be a much better experience overall. Remember the algorithm is designed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, not necessarily to give you the highest quality experience.
Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.
On a bigger scale (although they're not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.
The choice of communities/magazines are the same as long as they all federate, but if you're choosing an instance based on interest, location, policies, or other criteria (besides kbin-specific features), there are more Lemmy instances to choose from.
I know you're joking but it wouldn't make much difference to users if news organisations defederated from each other, most users will be on 3rd party instances.
I don't think that at all - a dozen or two replies to a topic is great because you can then reply to all of them on a personal level. That's how things were on forums in the old days. If you have hundreds of replies then there's the feeling of shouting in to the void, everyone competing for attention, that's where centralised social media platforms went wrong. On a decentralised platform we can take back the personal approach, that's what makes it better than Reddit - the danger is that it might get too centralised again and end up just as impersonal.
I'd potentially pay someone who is upfront about it, but the Guardian has always said they won't do that and has introduced this without announcement.