Running from one platform backed by people who supported Trump, right into another one. Gotta love controlled opposition and the illusion of choice.

A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

It was major human infrastructure failure.

And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.

There will be a branch of government telling them what to do. It will just be the courts, as they’re sued into oblivion by IP rights holders.

Just to be clear, publishers don’t like reviewers, either. They’re seen as gatekeepers of audiences and people to be managed and bribed, and that means keeping the reviewer market small. They want reviewers to be PR people with a fascade of being impartial, and few enough to count on one hand.

This is also somwthing that’s happening, then, because Nintendo sees a pathway to victory. Not only are their games licensed only for their own hardware, but they can claim the reviews are misleading and invalid because the games aren’t designed to run on the platforms they’re beinf reviewed on.

Like, none of this is Nintendo coming for your emulation catalogue. It’s them coming for people trying to generate an income from their games. And all of the big publishers are going to line up behind them on this, because they also hate anyone who’s making coin using their creation.

That’s capitalism. That’s what it means for something to be capital, and to own it. It’s what owning the means of production is all about.

This is not about the legality of emulation, unfortunately, but about whether people have the rights to publish lets plays without a license.

Many suits in the gaming industry see lets plays as theft. They see people making money using their games and believe lets players should have to pay to license thst content, and that they should have the right to revoke that license if they don’t like what people are saying about or doimg with their games.

I work in the industry, and I know people who work or who have worked at studios owned by every major punlisher in the west. This is a thing they all habe someone of import chomping at the bit for.

It’s just that none of them want to be the one singled out as the first or only one attacking lets plays. Nor to be the one that shoulders the costs of having their position challenged in court.

Not who you replied to, but I’ve experienced it on both vanilla Element and on Schildichat over and over, as well as repeated logouts that require signin approval from one of my other active sessions.

That are on devices on different floors of the house, or even in different parts of the city.

Shit’s jankey as hell.

No. Apple’s just getting paid from both sides.