Not enough users left Reddit after the blackout to either make a difference there or establish communities on Lemmy that are big enough to encourage people on the fence to switch over. To turn Lemmy into a viable alternative, we need to convince more Redditors to switch over by mentioning Lemmy in the right threads, making sure to explain features of Lemmy in terms of Reddit analogs to avoid the usual complaints of Lemmy being difficult to understand. Most people won't care, but the ones that do will be vital in bringing the userbase to the point where people will want to join Lemmy due to it having active communities rather than it just not being Reddit.
Zedstrian
joined 1 year ago
Could make use of Unicode lookalike letters (е and у in this case) to write Lemmy as Lеmmу.
The problem with federating with Threads is that then anyone who wants to join the Fediverse will just join Threads (especially the people already using Instagram or Facebook), leaving the success or failure of the Fediverse in the hands of a company whose interest is to attract as many people as possible to its platform, not contribute as an even partner in a federation.
Does Telegram have anything that torrents and usenet don't?
Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren't many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve's costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam's user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.
Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam's services aren't free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.
They're certainly a much worse value for the money and intentionally constrained in ways that maximize the profits of Apple services by making it inconvenient or impossible to use alternatives, but the UI is substantially better than Android. Aside from that and Apple device interoperability benefits, nearly any Android phone is a better choice for most people.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they're on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don't have to manually update each game. Valve's not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an "industry standard"), but given Nintendo's monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don't mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I'd like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren't promoted by a subreddit.
While it doesn't do live TV and doesn't work directly on an Apple TV, Real-Debrid is only $35 a year and is a relatively seamless Netflix replacement when used with Torrentio and Stremio.