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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Disclaimer: I have no qualifications or really any business talking about this…

    I think games aren’t the best kind of projects for open source. Some games are made open source after development ends which is cool because it opens up forks and modding (pixel dungeon did this). Most games require a single, unified, creative vision which is hard to get from an “anyone can help” contribution style. Most open source software are tools for doing specific things. It’s almost objective what needs to be done to improve the software while games are much more opinionated and fuzzy. So many times I’ve seen a game’s community rally behind a suggestion to address a problem and the developer ignores them and implements a better idea to more elegantly solve it. Most people aren’t game designers but they feel like they could be.

    An exception to this are certain, rules-based puzzly games. Bit-Burner is an open source hacking game with relatively simple mechanics and it works well.











  • Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?

    I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.

    I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.







  • Better editorial and moderation transparency are good. I support that. I’m worried about the “mitigating emotional harm” part of the bill. This could mean that the fringes of society are allowed to use coded language and dog whistles but people aren’t allowed to call them out (for example). Information about transitioning could be deemed “emotionally harmful”. I’m skeptical about the government’s ability to define “emotionally harmful” content, especially in the current political climate. It seems too broad.