Many people don't quite grasp the concept of the fediverse or different instances, and just landed somewhere after following an article or guide talking about Reddit replacements. We shouldn't be surprised that such people interact with their instance like it was a monolithic Reddit alternative.
trynn
joined 2 years ago
And even if an average user gets things installed and running, they're going to run into graphical issues and lack of polish that pretty much every Linux DE and application has. Stuff like dialog boxes opening up that are too big to fit on a smaller-resolution screen; inconsistent use of widgets, fonts, and icons; help strings being misspelled or completely missing; applications that look wildly different from each other just because they use different GUI frameworks; etc.
Linux "just works" in the loosest sense possible, and I say this as someone who has been using Linux for many years. It's certainly much better than it used to be in the early 2000s, but it continues to lack the design polish and cohesion of Windows and macOS, and that makes it rather off-putting for an average person to use.
I think it's basically the same idea as Citrix. They're targeting the same market, anyway, as far as I understand. I assume they each have their own pros and cons.
If you want to have absolute control over what other instances you federate with, then yes. Even then, though, other instances could still potentially defederate from your instance.
Kind of. If there's content from an instance that was on kbin.social before that instance was defederated then you'll be able to see that content. Any content that was posted to an instance after it is defederated will not show up. If you want to see that content then you'll have to go to the instance where it's hosted, or another instance that still federates with it.
That's a click-baity headline that doesn't really match the content of the article. Microsoft isn't going to be replacing desktop Windows installations with cloud installations, and nowhere in the article does it suggest it is. Many, many businesses require Windows installed on the desktop (and no, many of those can't switch to Linux, because the software they use is usually Windows-only). The article doesn't dig into who is currently using Windows 365 to stream the OS, but I would assume it's companies that are running computer kiosks, point-of-sale systems, or systems that would otherwise be extremely locked-down (like bank teller systems). Businesses that need system flexibility and resource-intensive applications aren't going to be using a cloud-based OS. Pretty-much any business that does engineering or creative work falls into that bucket.
My interpretation of the article is that they want to extend cloud-based Windows to other users that have extremely lightweight requirements. The biggest market I see is the education market, where you generally want to provide students with very locked down functionality. The article mentions competition with Chromebooks, which is also huge in the education space. I could see this as a competitor to an iPad/tablet too, for those who mostly do browsing, email, or lightweight web-based MS Office tasks and want to have a keyboard and mouse.
TL;DR: People are wildly misinterpreting this article, and there isn't going to be any kind of mass exodus to Linux because of Microsoft investing in Windows 365. Microsoft isn't going to stop selling installable copies of Windows.
There's evidence in the modlogs that the Lemmy developers (who are also the admins of lemmy.ml) have been banning users and removing posts from lemmy.ml with a reason of 'orientalism' or 'racism' when those users say anything mildly critical of China.
So it's a bit more than just refusing to suppress anti-American content on their instance.
Yes, I realize that, which is why I added the parenthetical about users providing Reddit's value. The fact remains that in the business/customer dynamic, we're on the customer side. We're not neutral bystanders, and we're sure as hell not part of the business side.
You seem to be missing two rather important points.
First, users have no obligation whatsoever to ensure Reddit is profitable. That is not our job. We're the customers (we also arguably create all the value of the service, but let's set that aside since nobody's expecting to get paid for commenting on threads on Reddit). If Reddit needs to find a way to be profitable, then it's up to them to do it in such a way that doesn't damage their business. They have full control over all of this, and have consistently made the wrong decision every step of the way. Reddit management could easily have done what most other companies do in situations like these and backpedaled, given some kind of pseudo-apology, and found a way to do what they want to do in a less objectionable manner. They didn't. If Reddit goes the way of MySpace, it'll be the fault of the /u/spez and the others running the business.
Secondly, the company was founded in 2005. That's almost 20 years ago. If they haven't found a way to be profitable in that amount of time then they're not going to. They have a fundamental business problem they need to fix, and they're in a tough spot because most solutions to that problem will end up damaging the business they're trying to save. Sucks to be them, but they really should have thought of that over a decade ago.
I think it's useful as a protest because it makes things more annoying for the "average" user. Those of us who've already migrated to kbin or lemmy are the ones who were always more likely to go somewhere else. Having obvious, visible, and sustained protests on Reddit (especially in large subs like r/pics) makes it so the average "I just want to use Reddit" user will at least notice something is up, and possibly annoy them enough to go seek out alternatives. And it also causes journalists to write news articles about it in mainstream publications, so even people who aren't on Reddit are finding out about it. Sure, it might drive up ad revenue in the short term, but I think it will have the longer-term effect of getting more people interested in moving off of Reddit.
@MxM111 From what I've read, kbin magazine mods can specify hashtags for their magazines and then micro-blog content (like from Mastodon) that uses those hash-tags will show up in the Microblog for that magazine. Or people can manually create a new post in the Microblog section of a magazine. I don't think there's any other way for content from Mastodon (or any of the other fediverse microblogs) to show up in kbin. And Lemmy doesn't have that feature at all, so people seeing this from Lemmy are probably confused by the entire topic.
Perhaps I've just read too many Microsoft business documents (I used to work for them years ago), but that's not how I interpret that slide. It looks more to me like they want to "cloud-ify" functionality that could be used either from a desktop install or from a cloud streamed version. The key phrase in that slide to me is "Use the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people's digital experience".
That kind of fits with what they've been doing by moving Windows login to use a Microsoft Account by default (which I hate, btw -- I'm one of those local account people), as well as integration of OneDrive as default file save location. It's the same kind of thing Apple's been doing with macOS for the past few years, adding iCloud integration with everything. If you move that functionality for desktop installs to mostly be cloud-based, it also allows you to create a more viable cloud-only offering. But it doesn't mean there's a reason to stop selling a desktop-installable version.
Microsoft is still a business, and they'd lose a ton of market-share by killing off desktop installs, especially in the enterprise sector, which is their bread and butter. They're looking to expand into other markets, not kill off large existing ones.