See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.
So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.
Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.
The actual article here gets to a great, very accurate conclusion: that information about unfinished, upcoming games is really not that valuable for users and an entirely artificial hype machine that insists on only paying attention to games before they exist. This is true.
There is very little genuine value in exploring a game in development, that is mostly a commercial concern. Which is fine, this is an entertainment industry. All parties here (publishers, journalists and audiences) are willingly engaging in a bit of a commercial transaction.
But journalistically and in terms of art criticism, the moment that coverage matters is after a game exists, not before. Really, leaking publishing plans or greenlit projects shouldn't be a big deal because publishing plans and business deals should be insider stuff that end users don't give a crap about. The relevant Insomniac game now is at most Spider-Man 2, not Wolverine or any later games they may or may not have deals to make. Mostly because there's no guarantee those games will ever exist or in what form.
But also, screw leaking personal info of game developers.
As always in left-leaning spaces, the best way to disarm any threat of reform is to wait for whatever purity test over a random issue to trigger a schism, sit back and watch. It's not even the first time it happens to Mastodon specifically.
In this case, a potential competitor that already has a reputation for being overcomplicated and having bad UX now needs an extra FAQ item called "can I interact with Threads from Mastodon?" and the answer is "it depends".
It's terrible, self-destructive and worse than either a yes or no call. Zuck boned Masto by federating a handful of employee accounts only AND he's still going to get the plausible deniability in front of regulators from federating with whatever's left. I'd be impressed if I thought Meta did it on purpose instead of it being entirely self-inflicted.
I'm guessing this is an American thing, because branded versions of common grocery items are typically industrial, overprocessed garbage. Or maybe the OP means actively manufactured stuff like cereal or yougrt as opposed to actual common groceries like meat, cheese or vegetables? i don't know it's weird phrasing either way.
FWIW, not in the US and it's unbranded fresh/locally sourced stuffstore brand from specific storesindustrial brands for me in most cases. Except what? Olive oil, maybe? Cookies, in that locally made cookies are actually more expensive than the mass produced sugar pucks. Eh... I don't know, soft drinks and snacks? Basically if it's actively trying to kill you the big brands do it better.
Huh. You'd think more instances were blocking, given the amount of buzz.
Being generallky in favor of letting individual users make this call that's... mildly encouraging. Of course I happen to be in an instance that is blocking, so...
It's worth noting that this still splits Mastodon pretty much in half. That's arguably a bigger concern than anything else Meta may be doing. They may not even have to actually federate to break Mastodon, which is a very interesting dynamic.
Ditto for all animals. A guy from out of town was here for work one time and he tried to pet a cute stray cat he saw hanging out next door. I ended up being the designated local chaperone to take him and his dumb purple sausage finger to the hospital at 2 AM that night.
I've been saying this from the go: users don't need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.
What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn't add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn't a feature.
Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes "do you want to see Threads or nah?", which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.
They didn't "chicken out", necessarily. It turns out that making huge social networks, and particularly for-profit ones, is not trivial. They connected a few accounts this week... but they also launched in the European Union this week, they weren't even out worldwide until now.
But hey, don't you worry, everybody is freaking out again. And if BlueSky ever finishes their own proprietary interoperability protocol and that is made AP-compatible on this end I'm sure we'll have another hipster breakdown.
Same. I have a very beefy PC, but it wasn't a huge problem to play through, and some of the visual issues it launched with did get fixed in patches. Doesn't mean everybody will have the same experience, and I did struggle to get a comfortable experience on PC handhelds, but the game is very playable for me.
Oh, absolutely not. Let me be clear, I do not question that the author was involved in the project and interacted with Google. I do not question any of the factual details in the article and my argument is not that he's lying. Total respect for him, his work at the time and even his opinions on how annoying and frustrating it was working with Google around.
What I'm saying is his perspective on the alleged failure of XMPP is specifically biased by his insider experience, that many of the examples he gives do not apply to AP, that the process he describes there is not EEE, that it's not the reason XMPP and Google Talk failed and that, as he admits throughout the piece, XMPP didn't in fact disappear or "die" after Talk's failure or because of their intervention.
I swear, I'm so tired of naive takes about "good" and "bad" corporations.
Corporations are corporations. They are groups of people legally mandated to make money for their shareholders. They're not individuals.
So yeah, I'm fairly confident that them taking steps towards joining ActivityPub is some mix of high ranking people thnking interoperability is cool, some other high ranking people thinking that may smooth over what seems like an immediate future full of legal challenges, particularly in Europe and some other people thinking that as long as all the newcomers to the Twitter corpse party are interoperable they can flex their superior resources and development.
Because that's how groups of people behave.
But I'm also very confident that nobody looked at the rounding error that is the fediverse userbase, disproportionally made up of FOSS true believers and fringe infosec nerds and went "we need to plot their demise". That's not a thing that groups of people concerned with building userbases in the billions talk about.
Hah. Alright, it's not deader than it would have been had Google not stepped in and then stepped out. We're grading "dead" late 2000s instant messaging apps on a bit of a curve here.
Huh. I was just saying up here that I don't think anybody genuinely believes the fediverse is a Meta competitor, but... guess I was wrong.
Mastodon does not have the upper hand by any metric. Threads alone has an order of magnitude more active users than the entire fediverse and Meta has multiple platforms with billions of users (and have signaled that they want Threads to reach that size).
You can absolutely argue that ActivityPub is a tech trendsetter and has an edge over BlueSky in that it's already up and running. You can't seriously argue that Mastodon or the fediverse are a threat, a competitor or have an advantage over Threads or Meta. One of the biggest hints that Meta isn't going for "EEE" here is that it's probably not worth the effort.
They do? I mean, a few times I did have to point out that Meta has multiple products breaking 2 billion active users, so the "fediverse" is a drop in the ocean, but not many people seem to stick with that argument after a quick bout of googling.
See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.
So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.
Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.