Could you please provide some sources for that? I’d like to know more.

First of all though, there is no such thing as a “hostile fork”. Being able to fork a project, for any reason, is the entire point of open source. And to be fair, not wanting to continue working for a for-profit company for free is a very good reason.

And yeah, when you suddenly turn a FOSS project that’s been developed with the help of a bunch of contributors, into a for-profit company, without making a big fuss about it beforehand and allow the contributors and community to weigh in, then yeah, that’s a hostile takeover of sorts, at least in my opinion. Developers gotta make money, but they could’ve done that by creating a new brand instead of taking over that of a previously completely FOSS project. Forgejo is preventing that exact thing from happening by joining Codeberg (a non-profit).

There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.

I use uBlock Origin + vaft from TwitchAdSolutions, which is currently working pretty well for me. I’ve had some issues before, and every now and then the stream can freeze up when an ad is played. But it’s so much better than having to endure even a second of those mind-rotting ads.

Shonk.

Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

• Are you interested in tech? There’s a couple of tech-focused instances.
• Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
• Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
• Maybe you’re interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

Why? When you’re looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I’m making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you’re just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don’t mind, but I feel like it’s good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There’s a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.

If you go by what the loudest ones are saying about the headphone jack removal, then yes, it does give the appearance that it’s a very unpopular change. However if you were to just ask random people on the street if they use(d) their headphone jack and what they think of this change, you’ll probably find there’s not a lot of vocal people out there that would not buy a phone just because it was missing it. That’s why Fairphone did their market research, right? Of course it’s still up for debate whether that was the right choice. And personally I would also prefer if the headphone jack was still default on phones.

Also see their official response on the audio jack removal.

TL;DR:

• Modularity and its influence on the phone’s size and weight
• Market and legislative trends (headphone jack is getting less popular)
• Longevity (less ports = less vulnerable to dust, water and general wear?)

The Minecraft that implemented microtransactions into the Bedrock Edition?
The Minecraft that forced everyone to move over to Microsoft accounts?
The Minecraft that implemented broken chat reporting that had to be fixed by the community?
The Minecraft that can now ban you from multiplayer altogether, even if you run your own server?
The Minecraft that shut down and DMCA’d a 18+ only but non-explicit bondage server and mod?

It’s still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.

Whether or not it’s a good change is likely mostly subjective. I’m guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

I’d even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don’t need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

Netcode, gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design, … all things that are present in co-op shooters as well. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying, but I feel like you have misunderstood what I was trying to communicate. (Which might be my fault.)

And yes, there are things that are unique (or more critical) to PvP shooters, but my point was: It’s overall less work, for developers and artists, to just have players fight each other over and over again, than to create content for players to cooperatively enjoy.

I did want to mention that, but left it out to keep my comment short. Yes, game development is very difficult and complex. Getting anything working out there is a huge accomplishment for everyone involved.

I have a feeling many companies found that the ratio of work (and thus investment) involved compared to the potential profit generated, especially with predatory MTX added to everything nowadays, means it’s pretty much a no-brainer to them to create PvP games rather than co-op ones.

Creating interesting gameplay systems and keeping things fresh for players is (I’d say) undoubtedly more difficult than just plotting players against one another. On top of that, netcode and balancing aren’t non-existent in co-op games.

Just take a look at the cancelled Blizzard MMO project “Titan”, which was partially repurposed to become Overwatch.

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?