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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • Every single distro maintaining their own version of every single Linux app is just a lot of work that wouldn’t need to be done if there was a way of making a version that worked on every distro out of the box. Plus that way app devs don’t have to worry about trying to hunt down every weird bug that only comes up occasionally while doing a specific thing using a specific version of a specific library that only one distro uses.

    None of them are better than a well maintained native app from your distro. In fact, realistically they kinda have to be at least a little worse than an actually well maintained one. If you include all the time spent maintaining native apps, universal formats are potentially orders of magnitude less work to maintain if they become the default though, and that is valuable. Valuable enough that a lot of the people doing that work are pushing for them pretty hard.


  • Try reading these comments here. There are just as many people adamant that open source mean source available as there are people who think it means libre. The vast majority of people here don’t follow free software the way you or I do, and this is a niche free alternative website. There’s no point in getting mad at people who don’t obsess over industry definitions and just use open source to mean software that has source code that is available. You know, like the source is open or something crazy like that. It just makes us look bitter and hostile while accomplishing nothing useful.



  • Open source is not a very useful term. Grayjay isn’t free and libre software because it restricts commercial use, and it is definitely source available software. Whether that makes it open source depends on who you ask, and no, OSI is not the undisputed arbiter of all things open source just because they say so.

    Griping because someone is using a different definition of open source than you do when they are being very clear about what exactly their license allows is not productive.


  • LBRY is a neat idea, but all the wacko extremists that managed to somehow get kicked off YouTube have taken it over and scared off most of the sane people. There are some good tech videos that still get mirrored there, but overall it’s not a good experience.

    Peertube seems like an even better idea, but so far it’s catching on even less. Maybe someday it will get popular enough to be great, but for now it’s kind of just not very useful. The big thing it’s missing that I think is stopping it from catching on is an effective way of finding videos you might be interested in, especially from smaller instances.


  • To be fair, I think Lemmy has some usability issues that are probably holding it back some. Like, typing !CoolCommunity@some.other.instance will make a completely useless link to the other instance that doesn’t let you subscribe to it or post there. There are also only two apps, and they’re cool, but clearly unfinished. That’s just a couple examples off the top of my head.

    I think they’re minor issues that will be ironed out relatively quickly, and whining about federation being unfathomable nerd stuff is just silly, but it is true that this is all happening before Lemmy was really ready for it, and a lot of casual users will be scared off by that.