Balder

Thanks for the clarification.

And I’d have thought the potential customers segment are exactly the Mastodon users.

I wouldn’t mind having some ads, but I wonder how some more extremists users would react.

But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be, it places the burden of “begging” on the instance owners, which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

Voyager has two themes: one uses Material design for Android users and one uses the old Apollo look-and-feel for iOS users.

All of this talk is actually ignoring the very fundamental aspect of this sort of transaction: trust.

When you buy from a place, you do it because you trust the store or the service to handle problems [1]. I remember one saying that a purchase is actually a very intimate relationship, and if you have any reason to think that person or service would screw up over, you’d never engage in any monetary transactions with them.

A marketplace where anyone can sell only works because despite your diligence to look for reputable sellers, the platform usually offers some assurance that you’ll be refunded for any type of scam, which means they take on the burden of doing some quality control on approving sellers. At least that’s how it works in Brazil, I suppose that a country with a high societal trust might have less of this problem, but the incentives are the heart of any system.

[1] Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you wanted it and you can end up being screwed by the service, but the expectation was there.

If it involves money, it has the incentive to game the system. So each instance would be dealing with multiple attempts from actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc. If it can be easily automated, the service would be 24/7 filled with AI spam and drive away all users, defeating the purpose entirely.

The only trustworthy reviews are from people who actually bought the product in the website, because then it has a negative incentive to spend that much money for one fake review.

Just take a look at the comments in this thread haha

Linus has made a video about this recently trying to build an equivalent machine. There’s really nothing like the base Mac Mini for its price, but that stops being true as soon as you make any upgrades.

The whole sales of Macs is a small portion of Apple’s earnings, but I think it’s still a lot in gross numbers.

I think it’s the sort of thing to keep a hold in case the market shifts and Apple needs to change strategies, like they’ve been doing in raising the percentage coming from services compared to iPhone sales. They’re monetizing the “ecosystem” more than ever.

Or some people like me prefer ergonomic keyboards and don’t use these miniature overpriced Apple keyboards.

Ever since I realized TikTok creates a unique share URL that tells the person you’re the one sharing it, I became paranoid with any social media share links that are created dynamically. I won’t share them unless I try them out first.

Cancel or allow??

In case people didn’t know what company he was referring to. /s

What’s the experience so far?

I see it more of a limitation, you don’t want your laptop to warm (and it shouldn’t in light use), but you want to cool it for the few times it does.

I think UEFI was something that took a while to be standardized and mostly because of Intel’s influence over it, while ARM seems more diverse both in manufacturers and types of devices. When things are decentralized it becomes much more difficult to get everyone on board of something.

This is actually good. There’s finally more room for good services offered by smaller companies that care about users.

I don’t think the people excited about Linux are using or talking about Ubuntu, though, which probably skews people’s perceptions if they’re on Lemmy and Reddit a lot. Enthusiast spaces have all the “I run arch btw” people and even weirder and more obscure distros.

This is exactly the thing. 10 years ago when I was in college, everybody just used Ubuntu for laptops, and nowadays I don’t hear about it at all. I had the impression it kinda died, but seems like things are more or less the same.

I wonder what percentage of desktop users still use Ubuntu nowadays. Seems like there’s no way to have a clear picture, besides DistroWatch which is more like “interest” and not actual usage?