I think what you want is a private forum. Someone will have to pony up some light server costs, but as long as you aren’t using a lot of bandwidth — you could disable image uploads, and make your users upload to Imgur and the like instead — it shouldn’t be much.

I remember seeing a private forum. It was for the movie Boys Don’t Cry — or rather, the trans man the movie was about. He was a real guy, and he was murdered for being trans. There’s a forum out there (or, there was 20 years ago) and all you can see is the name. You need a password to see anything else. Don’t have that? You’re probably not getting in. It’s a place for his friends and family, and probably some trusted friends they’ve made along the way.

I ran a forum once, about 15 years ago. I think I paid $10 or $20 a year for the dot-com, the URL. And I was paying a company called Invision something like $10 a month for them to host their forum on their server. I had admin access, I could do anything I wanted with it, but I had bandwidth limitations, and I had space limitations. It was fun for a bit. I ran it for almost two years. I wanted out, and a guy on the forum wanted to take it over. I said he could even keep the name, but I wasn’t going to keep paying for the address. I didn’t sell it, I just transferred ownership over. I never got charged again. I didn’t keep visiting it. I heard he shut it down a few months later. It’s not for everyone. If you’re not passionate about running a forum, get someone else to do it for you, and just have them maintain it. You don’t even have to be a mod. You let people apply and you tell your guy who you want to be a mod. He runs it from the shadows, only there to do upgrades. Maybe he posts the rules, too. But doesn’t participate in conversations. Maybe once in a blue moon you see him, but he’s not what you’d call a forum regular. Or he’s a snarky arsehole, I’ve seen admins like that.

You really can’t have a super private Lemmy comm. Not sure about instance. With the comm, you can make it so only approved people can post, but I don’t think you can hide it from everyone by default. That’s not what Lemmy is for, and we’re too small anyway (though, I don’t mean to speak for the people in charge). I think the forum thing might be your best bet.

Start with the mirror.

The stupid user can always learn. Which is funny, because the more I learn, the more I realise how much is out there left to learn. I could never learn it all in ten lifetimes. Which makes elves so interesting, they have the time, but most of them just hang around in the woods all day. The stories are about the few who venture out into the world. Most do not. Which is probably some kind of reflection on our own society.

The hostile one usually has deeper problems that require therapy. But I can’t be your couch. I’d probably just make you worse.

Same as the most recent Pixel and Galaxy… and it’s faster than both. Your point?

Also, the most recent phones aren’t necessary. We hit a plateau years ago. Your phone is mostly limited by its ageing battery more than anything else.

I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024) and a Galaxy S10 (2019). I think the iPhone might boot up a second faster? Has a better battery. Better camera. I’d be perfectly happy using the S10 as a daily driver. And to think an iPhone 11 (also 2019) is faster? We hit a plateau years ago. All a newer/faster phone is really for is top-end gaming (hobbled by a 6-7” screen) and AI. And the Pixel 10 Pro has some solid AI features. Of course, compute power doesn’t matter if it’s done off-site. (Not sure how Pixel does it.)

Woz was absolutely the best part of old Apple.

LLMs weren’t trained on every post on Reddit and forums. They focused on long-form comments that prioritised proper grammar and correct spelling. So while I don’t use AI to write my posts and comments, LLMs were likely trained on them, so even though you’re incorrect, I can’t really fault your assumption.

I can’t type like a kid to try to not sound like AI and I don’t want to do that anyway.

Why should I answer if you don’t read things that are inconvenient to or challenge your worldview? Just block people who do that and enjoy your echo chamber. That seems to be what you want.

Google makes a lot of money off that sentiment. The compute power of their latest Pixel has been compared to that of the iPhone 11 (2019). And it makes Google on average $1700 a year. More off some people than others.

But hey, vote with your wallet. Put your money into companies that will make the world you want to live in. I admit, I’m living in the past thinking of Apple as the Steve Jobs led company of 1983 with the six colours logo. But I still think computers should serve people first. Maybe none really do anymore, but that’s what I want.

At the other hyperbolic extreme, should games be allowed to exist that can’t run on the Switch?

I think it’s okay to make games that the technology doesn’t support yet. I bought the XB1 version of CP77. It upgraded to next-gen on my XSX. Runs great.

I mean, I have Macs they can barely run the game but I appreciate them supporting the platform.

CDPR did nothing wrong. PS4/XB1 were hobbled by hard drives. Put SSDs in them and they get a lot better. Same with PCs from the same era. Also, tech was not ready for their game. Not their fault for not letting it hold them back. Excluding consoles would have been worse for them.

They support Mac with CP77, which is worth a lot of goodwill for me. It plays better on my XSX, so I play it there. The Witcher 3 doesn’t support Mac, but I got it on the XSX for ten bucks. I’m happy. I already owned it on Steam, but I’m not mad. I got out of White Orchard for the first time! Looking forward to spending some quality time in the world.

That’s gonna be a hard no.

Unfortunately, for many people that hard no will become a soft no, which will become a maybe, which will become sometimes, and then it’ll be commonplace.

I’m pushing 50. I’m starting to wish I’d been born like 30 years prior. To still witness peak technology, but to dip before the big fall. Rather than having to survive it. I just hope we will.

Yes. I am a bit biased and I generally try to decorate biases when they aren’t obvious.

I do admit, I’m a bit older, so Apple was primarily a computer company while I was growing up. They were a bit of a media company before they were a phone company, with the iTunes Music Store. They still are with Apple Music and Apple TV.

To be fair, they run the iPhone like they run the Mac. They don’t allow pack in software, sometimes called shovelware, and including stuff like Facebook and Amazon. Though some say including their own apps counts. I don’t really think so, but I don’t think it’s worth debating. I think their rent seeking and not allowing third party app stores and sideloading is the more interesting criticism, and one I share as well.

The problem is that Apple is getting into services, which is where Google started. And adding ads is the next step and they’ve already begun that.

Jellyfin is fine if you’re an advanced user and you don’t care about streaming outside your network — and your software is made by an AI company (Microsoft) or an advertising company (Google). If it’s made by a computer company (Apple), you have a bit more work ahead of you. Mac users are a minority, so Jellyfin does not prioritise them. Even if you go all-in with ads and AI, you still don’t get remote streaming, which is kind of the point of Jellyfin.

iPhones come in up to 2TB (for the Pro Max) now. I have 512GB on mine, and I have a dozen HD-4K movies (one is actually 1440p) and a few TV shows. I use an app called Outplayer. It’s like VLC but it has folders, you don’t have to have everything in one place like VLC does. (Though, I suppose you can put your files in the Files app and have them open with VLC. But I mean in the app itself you can have folders.) Android phones have similar sizes, though I’m not sure they go up to 1-2TB. I’m not sure though. Older ones can get there with SD cards, but the read/write on those things is so slow, I would hate to move big videos to and from them. Like start that transfer and then go to bed, hope it’s done in the morning without errors.

Plex went from $120 to $250 a few years ago, and they warned people first. No one who had any sense waited for the price increase before buying. Like most others, I paid less. I think I paid $90? Anyway, at this point they’re just going after the whales. There were plenty of sub-$100 deals on Plex back in the day. Those who didn’t see any value in running your own Netflix chose not to pay, and of course they’re not gonna pay more. Plex was worth paying for at $120 or less. I could almost make the case for it at $250. At $750, if you’d told me 10-15 years ago when it was new how much value I’d get from it, I would have paid — and bought more hard drives.

If you do use Apple stuff, you kinda have the best option, but it’s not free, and it absolutely does not work outside your network. It’s called Infuse. First, the price. It’s priced old school, so if you buy lifetime, it’s only lifetime of the current major version. 6 or 7, I think. So when the next one comes out, you can buy at a discount or you can go to monthly. Yearly is actually the best option, it’s $10 a year. That’s not bad. Ten years of it is $100, and paying monthly or yearly means you’re always on the latest version. Considering lifetime is like $60-80, I think it’s a great deal to go yearly. The thing is, Infuse only works with Apple tech, and it’s not a web server and I don’t think you can make it be one. What it does do is catalogue your media and let you easily download to your Apple devices. It’s got some quirks I don’t like. For example, the player will work with a Plex (or Jellyfin) library, but it won’t write back. What that means is, if you’re watching a series on Plex hosted by Plex, you know, it’s gonna update what episode you’re on. Infuse will read that data (say, it knows you’re on episode 6), but it won’t tell Plex what it’s playing, so if you watch 2 episodes on Infuse, Plex still thinks you’re on 6. Infuse clients only talk to Infuse hosts. (Infuse also doesn’t need a host. Just share the files on the Mac using macOS’s built in file sharing feature like any OS has, and Infuse will read straight from that. It’s very smart and robust, and it’s also considered one of the best media players in the Apple ecosystem, rivaling VLC, and that other one that is only on Apple stuff that people love to recommend. I think it’s ugly, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool VLC diehard, so I got no room to talk about ugly software. I just like the one I’m used to.

I don’t think Jellyfin is really good at much of anything but being free. It’s not Plex. It kind of acts like Plex, but it doesn’t do for its users what Plex users consider worth paying for. Infuse doesn’t, either, but Infuse takes a different approach. It’s one that Plex also takes (you download stuff to your device rather than streaming it remotely, which is based on you having an idea of what you want to watch when you’re not at home), but it’s not Plex’s priority and I don’t know about Jellyfin.

That said, Jellyfin does let you edit certain things. For example, both Jellyfin and Plex use The TVDB for metadata, but The TVDB tends to prefer foreign language casts when multiple exist, so if you don’t speak the language, and you don’t listen to that dub, the metadata is kind of useless. The problem is that there’s no source as good as The TVDB that provides multiple dub casts, so the media server apps don’t have the ability to let you pick the cast based on your language preferences. However, Jellyfin will let you manually change the metadata, per show. It takes time, but you can do it. Plex doesn’t let you do it at all.

I do feel for people who are looking at Plex’s $750 price tag, but it’s not like they weren’t warned. Plex users have been promoting the hell out of it for years. Those who thought “it’ll go down” and it more than doubled, and then thought, “oh it’ll go down for sure now” and now that it’s tripling… you kinda gotta lay in the bed you made. Or go build one from scratch. Or use a computer from a company that isn’t based around AI or advertising and find a different way.

Also, I don’t think you can pirate Plex, if anyone’s asking. The server runs locally, but the Plex Pass features are server-based.

What I’d suggest if you don’t like Plex or paying for media server tools is, work on Jellyfin or donate in some way or otherwise contribute to the project. Because at some point Jellyfin is probably going to start charging. So I would “get in on the ground floor” now. Be using it. Be advocating for it. Be contributing to it any way you can. Not just to avoid having to pay if and when they do start charging (I do not know that they will, it’s just my guess), but to make it something worth paying for before (if it does start charging), it starts charging more and you’re back at square one. Because none of us are getting any younger. If you missed the Plex boat, don’t miss the Jellyfin boat. Or get into the Apple ecosystem and pony up for Infuse. (Though, as an Apple guy/Mac guy/iPhone guy, I don’t use or pay for Infuse. I just copy the files over to OutPlayer and play them there. It’s not as pretty, but it works.

Yeah, but at least on PC you can block the updates until all your mods update. And IIRC it just breaks scripting stuff like F4SE… for the most part… but a lot of stuff relies on that.

I like how GOG just flat out refused to push the “next gen update” until they fixed their shit or something. Thing is, they never did. Modders told them how to fix it, but apparently it had to be fixed on their end. They never do. Because they don’t care.

Fallout 4 is good until it just stops working. It’s fine on PC but they never got it fully working on Xbox. They still sell it though.

Yes… I was able to disable the subscription-oriented tools from Numbers (Excel) but not Pages (Word). Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. They’re marked so you can just not click on them, but there’s a way to hide them. I did it on one, I can probably do it on the others.

They’re completely free with a subscription for GenAI stuff that wasn’t there before. They didn’t take anything away from the free product.

I started Remember Me and Tell Me Why. Got bored real quick with them both. Remember Me, I spent less time with. I should really try it again, see where it goes.

Because unless you’re dropping $1500+ for a gaming rig, you can’t play them. If you have a gaming PC, it wouldn’t be a good deal for you. If you don’t have a gaming rig, but you have an Xbox, you could, with my idea, take advantage of Steam’s deeper sales and giveaways, and be able to play them on the Xbox.

If you buy a lot of games, you save a lot of money by buying from Steam/GOG, so it would be worth it. Especially for those of us who don’t have gaming rigs.

As far as I can tell, yes — and so is LibreOffice, since people are talking about that one, too. And I suspect they both have the same limitation — encrypted Office files. So yes, I can read .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. I can’t read Publisher (.pubx) files, but neither can Mac Office users — Microsoft never released Publisher for Mac. I can then write them to the iWork formats. I can also take an iWork document and export to Office. I suspect Office can import iWork files. Office interoperability is mostly a solved problem, though I think there are a few outlier cases.

This belongs in a “Leopards Ate My Face” comm. They jacked up the price of the Xbox. They doubled the price of GamePass Ultimate, and most games added to it are just shovelware trash.

Here’s a solution: Add Steam to GamePass Ultimate. What I’m saying is, for $23 a month or whatever it’s down to now, you can use Steam and play all your Steam games that will run on XSX (which should be most of them since it’s an x86-64 platform running a bastardised version of Windows). So you can get a game dirt cheap and play it on Xbox, but you have to pay Xbox monthly. You will still save money! Especially if you have a large Steam library. And not just Steam — add GOG and maybe Epic as well. So basically the platforms that have free games all the time. That would massively boost the value of GamePass, and since an XSX is still cheaper than a gaming PC, would offset the rising price of the console.

But who knows, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Let the Steam Machine come out and eat their lunch.