An important point is that advertising, tracking, all the junk which the OP link demonstrates, is technically not possible in the gemini protocol.

btw this is false. companies can still write a small text to advertise their product or create an advertisement image and distribute it over gemini. if the protocol allows data transfer, then it also allows distribution of ads.

needed to keep the umwashed masses away.

and it also keeps me away. i don’t like non-standard software for use-cases where existing software can already do the job well. that’s just artificially fucked-up architecture. artificial scarcity

yeah i’ve heard about gemini but i don’t like that they don’t just work over HTTP (which would be entirely doable, btw). so i need to download a custom client or a browser plug-in, and i don’t like it. i shouldn’t have to install another 3rd-party software on my device just to interact with online content which the browser can already do perfectly fine.

And then an ad that covers the screen so that controls are not visible, and follows on scrolling.

yeah and the “x” to close the ad is so small that you necessarily misclick (especially on mobile) and it opens another tab that redirects to the play store. now play store knows you’re into this shit and keeps recommending it to you.

• download our app (on mobile)
• asks you to make an account every time you scroll down a little further (like instagram actually does in my browser)
• article is 3 paragraphs long, afterwards 15 paragraphs of unrelated “recommended content”
• videos start autoplaying
• there’s an annoying source of sound that you can’t seem to track down

especially, a lot of tech CEOs who supported trump are tech CEOs, and dropping the facebook / instagram / etc platforms would seriously hurt their budget.

• carry objects around
• can actually lift meaningful amounts of weight
• probably has fingers and can rotate screws in etc.
• can probably operate tools that require fingers with more precision than mini-helicopters?

nah i think that the storage requirement grows approximately linear with the number of users, and maybe in the worst case quadratically; but the typical case should be linear.

yeah you already said it in your edit, but just to respond anyways:

grub’s simplicity is a feature. it does one thing and does it well.

it would be cool if i (or any user) could just contribute a part of their storage space / network connection to the video platform. something like “i store this video (that i just watched) for a month sothat others can see it too”.

unfortunately, as i understand it, there’s both technical and legal hurdles.

• technical hurdle: this doesn’t work for mobile, where network traffic is often limited. e.g. if i pay $10 for 50 GB upload/download capacity per month, then i don’t want 49 GB of those to be sucked up by other people’s video watching behavior.
• legal hurdle: what if some of the content is accidentally illegal? then i would be distributing illegal material, which can quickly become a problem for myself … (seeing how it is illegal in many countries to distribute copyrighted material, but not to watch it oneself).

how so?

the way i imagine it:

• as long as it’s american companies running everything, it’s “fair” and “free market”.
• as long as some company from abroad manages to do things better and more efficient, and american companies come under pressure, we’ll suddenly erect trade barriers and market hurdles to “protect american values”, “for our national security” or sth else. i’ve seen this soo many times. people who “just follow the rules” as long as the rules benefit them. as soon as the same rules start biting them in their own ass, suddenly for some reason they say that we need to change the rules.

As long as you keep your crimes to an extent that it doesn’t cause a massive backlash on large swaths of the country, it’s a different ballgame.

actually that does sound kinda reasonable. what is a crime, if not defined by its negative consequences for the rest of the population?

No this was capitalism in action. Capitalism bred the innovation in TRON.

Governments getting involved and putting their thumb on the scales to control the economy is the opposite of capitalism.

did you read the article? TRON was heavily backed by the japanese government.

what counts as an “operating system”? is it enough to just create another linux distro? is it enough to just fork the distro and add a new visual design to it?

as a hobby game dev (i made this game), i can confirm that most indie games do not reach the stage where they would be enjoyable by other players.

And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.

apple begs to differ

you’re writing as if you know what users want. let people decide themselves please. allow mastodon<->lemmy federation, make it an optional feature that you can activate on sign-up or in your profile setting. this way everyone is happy.

hmm, when i copy-paste your username into my mastodon instance search field, i get:

so i can see your user profile. however, it reports as “0 Posts” and when i scroll down, i do get a few of your posts/comments, but only very few (like 20 in total maybe).

this is what i meant when i talk about a lack of compatibility between lemmy/piefed and mastodon.

In my personal (unsubstantiated and speculative) opinion, the biggest hurdle to adoption for Lemmy and the fediverse is the lack of content in most topics outside of technology and politics.

Agree, but one thing to easily improve this is better federation with mastodon.

How many of the posts that you see in your feed come from mastodon? For me it’s probably less than 5%. Well guess what, mastodon users are about 90% of all fediverse users. stats (active mastodon users: 1.5M, active lemmy users: 36k)

Why don’t we see the large amount of already-existing content from mastodon?

(If you want to make as much content for lemmy, as is already existing for mastodon, we’d need about 1.5M new users. instead one technological change could get us there too.)