A lot of “Reporters” are just influencers at this point. They mostly stuck with Twitter so they could maintain their reach essentially.
Now Threads is out, and all these writers are flocking there and won’t shut the fuck up about it. Just yesterday TheVerge had like 7 out of 10 stories dedicated to Threads. It was all over my news feed elsewhere, too. Journalists I follow on Mastodon also won’t shut the fuck up about it in an attempt to port some users over to Threads.
Same with TikTok creators. Even FOSS (supposedly) enthusiasts are hiding behind this aura of “evangelizing” the Fediverse to Threads users as their reason for being there. But they are trying very hard to get their followers to also follow them on threads.
I agree in spirit, but Meta is a known bad actor and wrecking ball that ran actual psyops against its own users and their networks just to see if they could make people depressed. They also engage in extensive, worldwide election interference to upend democracies. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Edit: for those looking to get away from Mastodon’s main instances, give Fosstodon a look. Meta approached its admin with NDAs just like they did with Ruud, but refused it and published the email for openness. Here it is, by the way.
I’m positive that most of that reporting is outrage farming and anecdotes. Take the really famous example—people not dating people if they use an Android device. It originated with the NYPost. The NYPost is a rightwing gossip and conspiracy rag that makes its money with outrage farming.
And other outlets just uncritically picked it up and went with it. Now it is part of the assumed zeitgeist.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it happens. My Android-using family needles me constantly for using an iPhone and Macs. It is very annoying. But it isn’t exclusionary.
What’s exclusionary are what Apple and Meta do with iMessage and Whatsapp, respectively, and what Google does with what they call “RCS,” which is actually a proprietary fork of RCS entirely reliant on their proprietary middleware such that Google can gate keep (which is why there aren’t a slew of RCS apps out there; Google doesn’t allow access just like Apple doesn’t). These companies need to be broken up and whatever remains should be forced to create/adopt a standard and stick to it.
I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.
A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.
The good news is that I think Gavin may have already fixed it. I’m using the latest TestFlight build. Gavin said he submitted it to the AppStore just maybe 20 minutes ago, so fingers crossed.
It was. The Apollo dev, Christian, informed everyone on Mastodon that Reddit was a bitter child (my words) til the end and revoked the keys for Apollo and most other big third party apps (aka the competition) many hours before the developers were going to revoke them themselves.
Reddit thoroughly burned the bridge and pissed on the ashes as far as I’m concerned. Decades of use—gone. Now I wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit for any reason, just like Facebook, purely out of spite.
A lot of “Reporters” are just influencers at this point. They mostly stuck with Twitter so they could maintain their reach essentially.
Now Threads is out, and all these writers are flocking there and won’t shut the fuck up about it. Just yesterday TheVerge had like 7 out of 10 stories dedicated to Threads. It was all over my news feed elsewhere, too. Journalists I follow on Mastodon also won’t shut the fuck up about it in an attempt to port some users over to Threads.
Same with TikTok creators. Even FOSS (supposedly) enthusiasts are hiding behind this aura of “evangelizing” the Fediverse to Threads users as their reason for being there. But they are trying very hard to get their followers to also follow them on threads.