Trying to finish the Horizon Forbidden West story, but it’s a bit meh. Really sad about that! The HZD stories were great, and the world is as beautiful as ever, but I stopped caring at some point with the newest one. Other than that, I just bought the Age of Wonders 4 season pass and am trying out the new races and traits.

TIL!

Completely disagree!

Afaik most of them hate being treated differently like that, and others tiptoeing around them in fear of saying the wrong thing. If I know someone is sensitive about it or tells me that they don’t like a certain phrase then sure. But imo a good general rule is to treat them like the regular people they are, not delicate flowers not to be disturbed.

Can’t hide my gaming history 😅

Afaik it’s pretty common to call twinks “halfs”, conjoined or not. I’m a twin, and I’ve been asked about “my other half” my whole life. Same thing with couples, or any two people who are perceived as belonging together for some reason.

I’d say nobody. Not putting innocent people in jail is more important than punishing criminals imo. But idk what to do with the guilty half instead.

They could just choose someone to send to the debate, doesn’t have to be a candidate for the presidency.

I’m no fan of the right, but some of the rules only exist to prevent smaller alternatives from getting traction, especially in the media.

The reason the Jedi use prosthetics to train is because live lightsabers are so good.

I think the ban was a little too harsh, but removing that comment was the right decision.

I also see a few problems with your “your highness” comparison:

1. “Your highness” is an official title, not a personal designation. Its proper usage depends heavily on the context, e.g. the perceived social rank and status, how well people know each other, if it’s a formal or informal conversation, and so on. Pronouns have none of that, you just use the one people identify as and that’s it.

2. It implies that people just pick whatever term they can come up with to mess with others or to mock them. People don’t choose a pronoun lightly, they usually think about it a lot and it’s an important personal decision. They also usually pick one of the common pronouns, so it’s really not hard to just use it.

Making quick logical comparisons regarding social norms is a very tricky thing in my experience. There are many things going on that we aren’t fully aware of all of the time, and getting it wrong can hurt people badly.

Downvote it to oblivion then, but disagreeing or not being interested is no reason to remove a post.

Edit: Saw the post. I think the removal was valid, but the ban was a little harsh. And not being interested had nothing to do with it.

Nothing about what you just wrote has anything to do with closed source software though. You could just as well say that closed source helps them predict the future or draw shinier unicorns. It doesn’t!

Maybe you mean tightly coupled, stripped-down, preconfigured or vertically integrated, but you can do that just as well with open source software. No one is forcing them to make a general purpose chat app or offer the ability to choose a different server. It’s just a matter of being able to see, verify and modify the code.

differentiate above the competition […] charging for it

This is the only thing that comes close imo. But they stated specifically that they don’t want to make money with the chat app itself, so it doesn’t really work as a justification. They could easily offer server-side premium features or create a closed source premium-only version or extension, it’s no reason to make the base app closed source.

security theatre

They don’t have to do that, and they don’t afaik. Matrix itself can do proper e2ee just fine, and Beeper is pretty open about the fact that bridges hosted by them have to break e2ee to translate between platforms. They’d only need theater if their closed source app actually has some bad code in it, which is kind of my point.

Expanding to selling some user metadata, or sniffing the bridges, would be an extra

Again: Their Matrix server and bridges are open source right now, and it wouldn’t stop them from doing what you’re describing.

Too pedantic 😉

I just can’t help it. 😜

the connecting with a majority of people using the same closed source platform

The platform is open, including the part that connects to other closed source platforms. It’s just Matrix and open source bridges after all. And making the client app closed souce doesn’t help with any of that.

I’m sorry if I’m a bit pedantic about this, but it seems like you’re describing an upside to closed source software that’s just not there.

You’re definitely right that people are a bit too doom-and-gloom about it, Beeper did do a lot of good over the last few years!

But I also find it a bit odd that they talk so much about the importance of open source in messaging, and then release a closed source client without at least adressing the topic. Add the fact that they’ve been aquired by another company on the same day, and it starts to smell like another instance of openwashing.

Idk, we’ll have to see how it plays out I guess.

I can answer that: it’s the “I don’t care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people” experience.

Closed source doesn’t help with that though, you don’t have to care about privacy in open source.

except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway

They are working on on-device bridges that preserve e2ee, but making the client closed source kind of defeats the purpose here.

The thing is, we are talking about the Beeper service here. Yes Matrix is good, yes Beeper bridges are good, but a closed source Beeper app is bad. That’s what the criticism is about, and it doesn’t help if you deflect that by arguing about all the other things they are doing or that no one is forced to install it.

That’s not the point. An app doesn’t become good because you can just not use it.

What is this “closed source experience” you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, especially when their stated goal is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!

Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don’t really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I’m actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.

This is not applicable here, since Beeper is “just” Matrix + Bridges + Simplified UX!

It’s planned to be 100% API compatible with Lemmy, so you’d be able to use any Lemmy-UI with it. IDK why LW or any other instance would change their default UI.

A lot of things are not final and may change, but let’s just start with their stated goals, instead of speculating about all the things that could theoretically happen.

I don’t think there is anything to be concerned about.

Sublinks will live alongside Lemmy, just like kbin does today. Some Lemmy instances might switch to it under the hood at some point, but as a user you probably woudn’t even notice the change. All the data would be preserved, so your community would still be there unchanged.

It is basically Lemmy written in a different programming language, with more focus on moderation tools afaik. So for users it looks and works just like any other Lemmy instance does, and it’s part of the same Threadi-/Fediverse.