Rowin of Win

I can genuinely point to Jupiter, any time, day or night. I may need to get my bearings for NSEW but assuming I have any point of reference I can just point at Jupiter. It is my favourite planet and since I was a kid I was a little obsessed and figured it out, now it just runs in the background like a little JPS (Jupiter Positioning System) all the time.

Yeah, they have a bunch of smaller creators there too. Honestly their internal business structure seems much more mutually beneficial than something like YouTube could ever be. All of the creators that I watch who are on Nebula I watch exclusively there now and that has taken a good 40% of my YouTube time away. My current favourite is Stefan Milo who talks about paleoanthropology, basically how we can know about human prehistory and evolution. There was a great video about tracing the genetics of South American populations to figure out when humans arrived on the continent and where from, such interesting stuff.

Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.

This reminds me of the Big Mac decision. I can’t remember where but there was a burger place that had a Big Mac burger but the name was not a copy of the McDonalds one, it was iirc because the owner’s name was Mac. Anyway, they lost the case and therefore lost copyright protection on Big Mac, so Hungry Jacks/Burger King started renaming all their burgers to something something big Mac, just to mess with them. Maybe Apple will bite of more than they can chew and end up losing protection for the Apple logo or similar things.

My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.

I have had similar experiences here in Australia. People seem to be very distracted and stressed to the point where they have no time to consider ideas like privacy, security, and societal improvement. Maybe I am an idealist but I would hope to leave a better world for those that will follow us and allowing another rise of authoritarianism seems like it is a very bad idea.

Yeah! I noticed this too, I had it installed to follow specific creators and try out the platform and then BOOM! Nazis! I was so surprised and then realised that there were basically 2 groups there, those for the tech and those for the lack of moderation. I would love to see something more like Lemmy in terms of communities, moderation, and so on, all federated, but video is so damn heavy to serve and I just can’t imagine standard video codecs being up to the job of making it affordable.

A note here about the context from near the end of the article, which is very worth reading.

“This case is a trial for the Ministry of Interior, which aims to normalise this framing for repressive purposes. During a Senate hearing that followed the violent repression of protests in Sainte-Soline [environmental protests severely repressed that happened in France in 2023], Gérald Darmanin, the French Minister of Interior, implored the legislature to change the law so that it would be possible to hack into demonstrators’ mobile phones, especially those using “Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram”: “Give us the same means for extreme violence as for terrorism”. His justification was that “there is a very strong, advanced paranoia in ultra-left circles […] who use encrypted messaging”, which can be explained by a “clandestine culture”. In an attempt to demonstrate the supposed violence of Sainte-Soline activists, he also cited the 8 December affair as an example of a “foiled attack” by the “ultra-left”, in defiance of any presumption of innocence23.”

This is not just about use of technology signalling terrorism, it is about repression of dissent from the current government. Environmental protests, protests against the changes to pensions, and really any other protests are a target. This is antidemocratic at it’s core and will be expanded unless resisted. This kind of authoritarian behaviour clearly shows the need for the very thing they are repressing, technology to maintain privacy and security for those the state disagrees with.

Isn’t the EU currently pushing to allow third party app stores on devices?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22996248/apple-sideloading-apps-store-third-party-eu-dma-requirement

If they are pushing in that direction I wonder how that will gel with this kind of approach from France? Maybe EU law is a better place to remedy this rather than French law? Maybe an appeal after this case is settled will allow a more reasonable judge to oversee the case.

For a shockingly long moment I thought this was about Counter Strike 2.

Still, awesome, mixed use zoning, maybe we can have tram lines with grass and tunneled train lines.

I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.