It’s an important software choice just like choosing a browser (though unfortunately browser choices are much more limited these days).

I usually see people discussing distros but I feel like picking the right DE makes much bigger impact.

Yes I do feel like the emphasis is often wrong; choosing a distro should be about choosing a philosophy towards included packages and updates, choosing a DE is much more relevant for day-to-day user experience/workflow.

If it works against the user’s intention then I’d say that’s friction of another sort. For example if you go to a website and scroll more than you wanted to due to dark UX (as opposed to good content), the user may not immediately realise it’s a bad experience for them, but still they’ve wasted extra time hence the site has got in the way of what they were originally trying to achieve. It’s become normalised so it’s not always recognised.

On a personal note, I want to be able to go on Lemmy and say “OK, I’ll read the top 2 pages of my subscribed communities” and let that be it, that’s a much more reasonable way of approaching a large amount of content.

It prevents you from keeping track of how much you’ve read and makes the site more addictive with no significant upside, and even without that it’s worse UX when you try to go back and read something from earlier you have no idea where it is. Commercial sites still use it because they care more about keeping users on the platform than overall UX, but there’s no need for software like Lemmy to do it. Yes, dark UX is bad UX, it’s the worst kind in fact.

If it looks like anything of the past then it looks like the web from 10-15 years ago pre-mass-enshittification, maybe people have forgotten what non user hostile websites look like.

Photon has infinite scrolling, which is horrible.

I used Lemmy for months, mostly in the browser and my UX was absolutely horrible.

The default browser UI sucks.

How long ago? It was a bit flaky a couple of years ago but for me now it’s perfect - like Reddit UI before it enshittified.

Jago Hazzard did a good video about this a couple of years ago when it was in testing, for those interested. https://youtu.be/dV441HnVI34

I don’t like to ever assume negative intent without good evidence. I think I’m taking the neutral rather than optimistic view here. If you want me to speculate whether this new company is good or evil, that would just be my speculation; it would depend how they intend to make money out of it, from my gut instinct I can’t say they give me any specific Google vibes yet.

The freedom to decide what software am I allowed to run on my PC is important for me though

I’m right with you there, and it’s proprietary software that threatens that, nothing included in this announcement does though.

But how it’s implemented means everything. Google’s play integrity is corrupting because it’s designed to lock vendors in to Google’s proprietary ecosystem. You’re not getting that from this ‘language’ alone, it could be the case but it’s a massive leap at this point.

They haven’t announced anything other than a vague outline of what they’re trying to solve, it could be implemented in so many ways at this point.

In what sense?

Because different people have different tastes?

Maybe I’m being stupid, what is the London angle on this exactly?

None of this affects what happened “back in the day” which is what I was talking about.

That said, my understanding of the current packaging philosophy of RHEL/CentOS Stream is that embargoed security fixes go in to RHEL first, then to CentOS Stream once the embargo is lifted (that’s pretty much as you’d expect), otherwise everything goes in to CentOS Stream first. Unless you have counter-examples I’ve not heard of?

Paying for services isn’t philosophically incompatible with FOSS, that’s how companies like RedHat broke through back in the day, but paying for “quick and high-quality security updates” strikes me as alarming. Am I to take from that that they’re holding back high-quality security updates from some users? Unless maybe we’re talking about extended support for EoL software.

I think even Slop is too benign for what Meta is.

The question isn’t whether it’s important news, the question is whether it’s relevant for this community. There are plenty of places to discuss Trump, so does it really have to be here as well? (That’s an open question, by the way, I’m not saying either way here).

I think the main problem is “link aggregator” which doesn’t make a lot of sense as the main function is discussion. For a minimal change you could go for “a discussion platform for the fediverse”.

If “fediverse” is too obscure; you could try just “a decentralised discussion platform”. Decentralised isn’t technical, you can’t fully describe the fediverse in a sentence but “decentralised” gives a clue.

If you made this yourself and are looking for feedback (that’s unclear), one issue is:

No branch of government should be allowed to accumulate too much power.

Surely by definition too much power is too much regardless of your personal threshold for “too much”, hence everyone’s answer will be the same?

Doubt it, I don’t even need to click on it, there’s a certain style guide for weather headlines that are full of it. Feel free to come back here and mock me if we are blasted by snow at the weekend.