Right with you on that. Linux documentation is almost universally written for an audience who is already in that in-group of experts. Want to get started with no experience? Good luck.

That’s an example of the speaker not being aware of their audience, or assuming that anyone listening/reading is “like them.” There’s definitely a time and place for “in-group jargon” (which is found in all sorts of in-groups, not just techie ones), but usually your audience is going to be more general. My personal rule is that if I have to use jargon that a general audience would likely not understand, I will give a plain language explanation.

The main reason behind Reddit’s API changes and Twitter Blue is money. This is and always will be the driving force for companies.
It makes sense. The people need to be payed, the servers need to be run.

Twitter Blue exists because Musk is an asshat, and screwed himself out of billions of dollars, and he’s trying to claw some back. Reddit’s API changes are because they’re trying to set up for an IPO to line the pockets of the board and executives, not just of Reddit, but of Advance Publications, the parent company.

That IPO set up isn’t only about profitability right now, it’s also about the profitability of reddit going forward. The effect of all the nonsense that’s going on over there is that the userbase is having the critical people culled away, leaving only the people who don’t understand or care. This means that Reddit The Company will be more in control of the content. Advertisers don’t like their ads showing up next to porn, and it’s arguable that people who are critical of the way reddit behaves are less likely to click ads (on purpose), and certainly less likely to convert into customers for those advertisers.

Did Reddit The Company plan it that way? Not a chance. They’ve been doing stupid things hamfistedly for a while, some might say since the very beginning.

As a counter to your opinion that the fediverse is not the future of the internet: Meta jumped in, Threads is an ActivityPub platform. Wikimedia has an instance now. I believe the Netherlands government stood up an instance. I don’t know the federation status of any of those, but it’s something.

The difference between standalone siloed platforms like Instagram, or Reddit, or, Digg, or SomethingAwful, or Fark, or Twitter, or, or, or – is that ActivityPub is a protocol. Anyone can write code to create a platform to use ActivityPub, and have that platform interact with other ActivityPub content in a myriad of ways. I fully expect there to come an ActivityPub platform that really catches on, much more powerfully than any of the current ones out there.

I got to see their final show, the one they broke up at, Chicago Grant Park, July 4, 1991. Material Issue also played.

Really the only reason you’d want to go liability only is if you own the car outright, and the insurance value of the car is very low. If you have a $500 deductible, and your car is only worth $1500, you’ll get paid $1000 on a total loss - which would be just about any accident whatsoever, even one that would leave the car safely driveable. It wouldn’t make sense to make a claim that would only give you $1000, and make you have to buy a new-to-you car and take on payments again, so it doesn’t make sense to pay for that coverage in the first place.

It’s where I happened to land, but I’ve been quite happy. ernest is the dev, and he’s tops. There’s a KBin Enhancement Suite going already which includes a toggle for @username@instance display, as well as plenty of other things. hariette is developing Artemis as a kbin-compatiable mobile app for iOS and Android (which also promises future lemmy compatibility). The kbin interface is pretty clean and intuitive, and I’m looking forward to how it matures.

Replacements, Here Comes a Regular and Unsatisfied might fit.

If you drop your coverage from comp/collision to liability only, you’re paying less, and assuming more risk - because if you get in an accident, your insurance will not cover the cost of repairing your car (or receiving a payout if it’s a total loss). A 2020 model year car is still worth having comp/collision coverage on.

Everything I say is a Nougat joke, by definition.

Mine’s even better!

Older, saltier, and more bitter. You?

@db2 !!! It’s you!!!

I did the same thing, about eight years ago. By day three, I wasn’t coughing up phlegm anymore. By day five, I could climb stairs without getting winded. After about a year, my dentist told me that my gums were way healthier.

Is it beneficial, when compared to not doing it? Most probably not. Is it far less damaging than inhaling tobacco smoke? Absolutely.

Really, if your instance is just for you and your account (maybe a few friends, family), and you’re not running any communities on it (all your posts and comments are on other instances), there’s really no reason anyone would defed you. Unless you’re a dick.

I have to think that if your very small private instance was federated with a large public instance, your instance would pull down content from the public one. That’s bandwidth, and that’s costing the large instance some amount of money/performance. Because your small private instance isn’t “giving back” a level of content that the large instance would want or need, that could be the unpredictable reason you mentioned.

Now, I don’t see that being a real issue unless there are so many low-content instances that Large Instance reviews their usage and finds out that an unacceptably high portion of their bandwidth is being used by “leeches,” and wants to control cost.

Well, yeah - once you first open the applications, then they are installed, hence the “Click-to-Run.” Microsoft Office is never free, although it can be very reasonably priced if you have a student discount.

As other people have said, you have a few choices:

• If you really want to use an installed version of Microsoft Office, pay for the Office 365 subscription.
• If you really want to use an installed application, but don’t want to pay money, there’s LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and many others noted elsewhere.
• If you don’t need a locally installed application, you can use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office Online, free for personal use; or the online Google suite of productivity applications.

New computers will often come with a trial of Office 365, installed as “Office Click-to-Run.”

We used XMPP for chat (OpenFire) at my work for a while. I used to use it in one of those multi-protocol chat clients (it was Trillian, if I recall).

… simply defederating will not solve this (in most cases).

Oh it would address that concern, but it’s a very heavy-handed action. At present, I don’t think there’s enough reason for instances to defed from Threads, even when there are good reasons for me to want myself to be. That really plays into my not jumping over to some instance which has already taken that step; I would wonder about how such an instance was being shepherded in other ways.

Once there are proven and reliable mobile apps for lemmy and kbin and whatever, the barrier to entry for the general public will be much lower. But the general public also needs to know that there are ways to get to fediverse content outside of the Meta environment. You and I and those like us here now are still pretty early adopters.

Let me restate the thing I was originally responding to:

Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning.

This statement is so childishly oversimplified that it’s just wrong. It might make people “feel better” about piracy (in particular, their own piracy actions), but it does so based on a plainly invalid argument. That’s what I have been trying to point out.

Are there problems with the way media sales are handled? Absolutely. When Amazon is able to pull your purchases back out of your access that they made consumers feel that they would have unlimited and perpetual access to (even if the very fine print said otherwise), that’s a huge problem. If a particular piece of media just isn’t available anywhere except for via streaming (or, frankly, anywhere at all outside of piracy), that’s also a problem.

OP’s post doesn’t address any of that. The suggestion is that “If I have paid for something, I (edit: should) have full, unlimited, and perpetual ownership rights to it.” That’s just not true; the landscape of commerce is far more complicated than that, and it’s a mistake to just join into a weird hug boc about it.

The general public does not understand federation. When Threads makes content that I have created via kbin.social visible on Threads, very many people are going to think that that content was created on Threads. And Meta then takes that content, aggregated with all the other non-Threads initiated fediverse content, and monetizes it. They are using “not their content” to enhance the desirability of their portal, and certainly placing ads in its vicinity. As with any instance, they can also curate that content to promote their chosen agenda, which is surely in part “increasing engagement.”

We’ve seen how “increasing engagement” has been done by Meta and other companies already: ragebaiting and misinformation. While there is no way to completely prevent this, I want to avoid content that I have created from being used in that way. If there was a way for me to individually defederate from Threads, so that Threads could not see my content, I would turn that switch on in an instant. So far as I know, the only way for my content to be excluded from being viewed via Threads is for the instance my account is on to defederate. I’m not in any way asking for kbin.social to defed from Threads, just noting that that is currently the only functional way to accomplish the stated goal.

I do understand that there are already instances that have done that very thing, and I am certainly able to jump over and use one of those instead. I may do that at some point, but I am pleased with the interface at kbin.social, and developer of kbin’s work. For the moment, I want to watch and see how things play out, becoming more informed before I make a decision about how I interact with the fediverse.

I’m not comparing renting to owning, I’m pointing out that they are different things, and each has an appropriate place. The image in the OP makes a blanket statement implying that all payment equals permanent ownership.

It is certainly true that there are things people pay for that they should have more rights of ownership over, but don’t (even, and maybe especially, if they are led to believe they have ownership rights that they do not).

But even ownership of, for example, my car, does not extend to me the right to reverse engineer my car and build another identical one, and then sell that.

When you enter into a contract, where you pay for a product or service, there are a wide variety of rights you do or don’t receive, depending on the agreement.

Edit: Since your employer pays you for your labor, they own you, right?

That’s why I claim ownership of every hotel room I’ve ever stayed in and every car I’ve ever rented.

I once had some knob trying to argue to me that “god is real” because “the Incas believed the sun was a god, and the sun is real.”