I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chromium-based, because I think it’s the slickest browser out there.

But it’s chromium, so it’s time to move on to Firefox regardless.

Ladybird development can’t happen fast enough.

Fr seeing in the modlog that people are regularly getting banned from parts of the fediverse for innocuous shit like “chronic downvoting” is so disappointing.

Imo however you do or do not hit the little arrow buttons should never have any bearing on your account or standing, at all.

I don’t even understand why mods/admins have access to see how people are voting, fuck that bullshit.

I have a Pixel. It is literally made by one of the largest advertising companies in the world.

Bigger screens mean bigger and more obtrusive ads.

I’m convinced this is 90% of the reason right here.

Why is there steak at the steakhouse??

That’s exactly what the US government did under Teddy Roosevelt when it forced by law these large entities to divest and break up into smaller ones not subsidiarized to each other. And yes, they should also do this to Amazon and Microsoft.

edit: I guess I should say I understand they can’t force them to break up in this instance, but they can simply state they won’t do business with the entities at present and recommend it. If that doesn’t happen, I am confident other savvy investors will be happy to fill any hole left by these giants. The world will keep turning, I promise.

My friend, you yourself have been implying this whole time that Google’s infrastructure is too vital and important to remove - how do you not see that this means they are too powerful? Remember trust-busting? Remember anti-monopoly activism? Nobody thought that by breaking up the railroads people wouldn’t need trains anymore, but they understood the danger of allowing a single company to have such market dominance and what it that would mean for consumers. Same thing here. And yes, I’m aware this requires continual diligence as the phone companies that were once PacBell are now bigger than it was, but that lacking of failure to continue enforcing anti-trust doesn’t mean the concept is wrong.

No single company should be allowed to have such influence that very idea of them going away leads to the very doomsday considerations we’ve been talking about. That’s what this is all about.

Step one in saving us from the oncoming corporate technocracy?

None that insane hyperbole doomsday scenario would happen. None of it.

I think people and societies are vastly more resilient that you’re implying, and would survive an admittedly complex 6 month period to switch necessary services. Would it be hard? Yeah absolutely. But I’ve never accepted “but it’s so hard!!” as valid reason to hold off positive progress.

What “normal solutions” are actually in progress with any real potential of happening? Be for fucking real.

Meanwhile what insane doomsday scenario do you think would happen if Google services were banned and people had the given period to find alternatives?

You’re talking about a fantasy solution that doesn’t exist then blowing the consequences of this possible action wildly out of proportion in gross hyperbole.

Yes you’re right, blocking a single corporation is totally similar to dropping a nuclear weapon on a civilian site, you’ve shown me the error of my ways.

Holy fucking hyperbole, Batman!

Taking a stance against corporate overreach feels extremely necessary to me.

Worthwhile chaos. It’s exactly that fear of consequences that enables their power

Dude that’s not fucking fair.

I wanna see you try to look for evidence with all that bribery and police gang money obscuring your vision and see if you do any better.

“Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”

Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.

Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.

This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”

Imo we need to start attaching criminal penalties to the people behind businesses that knowingly abuse their power and position like this. Corporate bullying isn’t a financial position, it’s a failing of ethics.

I agree they don’t have to be anti-consumer to be pro-developer, but my point is that that is how they are approaching being pro-developer - by limiting pro-consumer features at the behest of developers. Or perhaps I should be saying more actively publishers, to be fair.

Steam doesn’t engage in the same kind of strong-arming and anti-consumer practices, so it’s not exactly comparable, is it?

I say this every time Epic comes up but it remains the same.

Steam is the pro-consumer storefront. Epic is the pro-developer storefront. What Epic seems to fail to understand is that by being so staunchly pro-developer, they effectively become anti-consumer. And as a consumer, I’m just not going to spend money on an anti-consumer marketplace.

When Epic considers adding necessary pro-consumer measures like actual user reviews so I can hear how a game actual performs from real end users, then and only then will I consider Epic a real storefront viable for consumers.