As fun as it is to watch Musk do dumb stuff, giving him credit for killing HSR is a reach. There’s a really great article about it here — even Epstein was involved for some reason!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html
Attitudes like this are much worse for the health of the Fediverse, IMO.
A popular instance with users and content? Kill it immediately, we can’t risk people actually using the Fediverse.
Wow, the level of detail on this theme is really impressive!
As as aside, I didn’t realize that GTK had officially banned theming. That seems…dumb.
I remember people constantly asking for that to be a feature on Reddit, but I don’t believe it was ever implemented.
That’s the tragedy of the commons, and you’ll find it’s true for basically every possible societal organization.
Literally a Unicode character:
Anyway, I wasn’t aware that GIMP UX suffers, I’ve never used anything else and am happy with it.
My argument here is that by never having used anything else, you wouldn’t necessarily realize how much better other UX choices could have been.
That said, I do have to give the devs some credit, as they have fixed two major issues, by adding single-window-mode and unifying the transform tools. Having each transform be its own separate tool was just awful UX IMO.
The biggest remaining UX problem, in my opinion, is the way GIMP forces layers to have fixed boundaries. Literally no other layer-based image editor has fixed layer boundaries, because it makes very little sense as a concept. Layers should solely be defined by their content, not by arbitrary layer properties set in a dialog box.
Honestly I feel like this attitude is the reason GIMP’s UX suffers. They’re so determined to be “not like photoshop” that they’re unwilling to fix some of their more boneheaded UI decisions out of fear that they’d be seen as copying photoshop.
Remember that Android is Linux-based – so keeping that in mind, a massive amount of normal users use Linux on a daily basis.
I think the key is, operating systems are meant to exist in the background. If it’s working well, you don’t think about it at all.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I don’t really agree with the article’s premise about what happened to XMPP.
XMPP was a niche thing before Google appeared, and it remained a niche thing after Google left. That said, it would have been much better had Google continued to support it!
Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.
Let’s consider your email example – I don’t like a lot of stuff Google has done. By your proposed rules, should, say, ProtonMail block all emails from Gmail to prove a point?
I remember it well, and I was annoyed by it!
But in the end, I’d argue Google dropping XMPP simply restored the status quo: XMPP went back to being the same niche thing it was before Google started supporting it.
The Fediverse is just a term for “social networks that use ActivityPub”
Imagine if Facebook offered RSS feeds. That’d be nice right? It wouldn’t ruin anyone’s experience if they started supporting an open standard like that.
Supporting ActivityPub is no different. It will let people on third party clients connect to Facebook properties. Don’t want to do that? You don’t have to!
This is actually why I’m excited for ActivityPub in Threads. I’m hoping that it can function as a gateway drug to the Fediverse.
“Like Threads? Then continue to follow all your friends there while moving to an ad-free Mastodon client!”
I love the idea of this, but the only reason I check Instagram is to see what my friends are posting, which I couldn’t do on an alternative, sadly.
While all that is true, you actually shouldn’t do that in your review, as that will often get it flagged/removed. (They’ll think it’s not a “real” review and instead part of a review bombing effort.)
they have full control over the app
Yup, this is also my problem with Signal; you’re stuck with whatever boneheaded decisions the devs make and there’s nothing you can do about it. Personally, my pet peeve is their refusal to add any kind of data export. As someone who likes backing up chat history, this is a dealbreaker for me.
Yup. Lest we forget, Android is Linux-based, and it’s the most popular consumer operating system in the world.