marketing marketing marketing. and timing the crypto madness, which gave them a huge marketshare and free word-of-mouth marketing access.
Brave puts most of their resources into marketing rather than development of the browser itself (unless the development helps with the marketing opportunity, like crypto).
i donât use the mobile clients, only desktop. but for comparison, nheko is lightning fast and smooth (like telegram). but has a ton of bugs and lacks a lot of features (not to mention the interface isnât very appealing). no client for matrix except for element offers all the current features because element is the main client used for development of the service and protocol.
people always want to argue when i say electron sucks. fact of the matter is, electron do suck, the reason most developers nowdays choose to use it is simply because it takes no effort to develop software with the thousands of free frameworks and resources on the market and the ability to make a multi-platform client with zero effort through electron, itâs also very easy to maintain. but this comes at a cost, no amount of optimization will fix the inherent issues of electron no matter how much you will it. again, electron sucks.
tauri is the future, as it seeks to resolve all the inherent issues with electron. but it is not mature enough yet for the market.
edit: full disclosure, i donât actually use telegram for anything and i donât support telegram at all. i donât trust it and i donât think anyone else should either. but iâm not going to deny the masterpiece that is the desktop client from a user point of view.
As much as I would love for matrix to be the champion of all chat protocols (I use it as my primary myself). It is undeniable that Telegram has by far the best chat client on the market. It is the only modern and fully featured non-electron chat client available, itâs lightning fast and smooth as fuck, and always âjust worksâ and without mobile/connect nonsense, which is what the enduser want. Matrix is awesome as a concept, but the only client worth your time is Element, which is clunky, slow, and buggy - of course, most of the blame is on electron. It certainly doesnât help that the most stable server, matrix.org, also tends to bug out from time to time.
i like how piracy largely died because of how good netflix was, and now when itâs back because of hollywood gutting netflix and setting up a million streaming services no one can afford; they realize piracy is back and insist on dealing with piracy by cracking down on the users, instead of, you know, recognizing the reason for why itâs back, and offering the solution that actually worked the first time around.
itâs definitely not impossible to change, not only is lemmy a very new site, but itâs especially possible since theyâre not dependent on SEO for current growth (nor can they grow as well with .ml as you pointed out). all they would have to do is to redirect lemmy.ml to a new domain like lemmy.social or whatever, and maintain a statement that the new domain is their primary. after a year or two, the volume of people using .ml would be minimal to none.
as someone who used to do art for games, and write a lot of fiction, i disagree. intellectual property is good in the way that whatever you make, is yours to dictate how itâs applied.
what i mean is, if i write a book, no one should be allowed to copy the text and sell my book as theirs without my explicit permission and credit. if i make a game, no one should be allowed to go and put my art in their own game without my explicit permission and credit.
if you pirate my books, or pirate my games, thatâs entirely different. assuming the content is provided to the people without modifications, for free, with the sole purpose of being shared and enjoyed by the community. basically, it is perfectly moral to pirate content. because pirating is entirely different from infringing on someoneâs intellectual property.
i find getting people onto element is impossible. iâve got two people there after years of trying, and only because they donât even use phones due to paranoia. and since my hobbies are more conventional, there are no relevant communities for me (or anyone else that i know personally), nor does the current userbase likely have any interest of joining such hobby groups.
iâd love for element to have relevance. but one of the core reasons facebook works is simply because of the pre-existing userbase for every new community started, making it easy to grow (and even outcompete communities on other platforms). if facebook gets knocked down, then the commonality of the fediverse has a bigger chance of people adopting the niche community through the platforms available with other use-cases beside the community youâre trying to start, a lot more so over a chat application that has barely any users at all, especially none in common. and i say this, as someone who basically see matrix as the future and would never recommend anything but matrix for the purpose of chat and community communication.
thatâs awesome!!
i mean, it all really depends on your goals. costs for both hardware and fish can be really affordable depending on what you set out to do. each species has different requirements and while some can be kept together, for the intention of breeding, itâs usually best to keep them as a single species tank.
i assume your knowledge surrounding the hobby is limited, so knowing your own goals might not be feasible right now. usually, people start out by getting a single fish at the pet store, learning more about it, about other fish, and eventually finding their passion.
if you just want to keep an affordable fish to âtryâ the hobby. your absolute, without a doubt, best option, is a betta. theyâre the most popular species because they hit so many marks on what first-time keepers are looking for. brilliant colors. affordable. variable personalities. and incredibly low maintenance (this could also be a bad thing, since theyâll survive just about anything in terms of what fish can handle).
before i go into details, iâm just going to point out that there are certain expected standards, i donât want to explain why things are a certain way at every point as iâd run out of words in this post. if you have questions though, feel free to ask :)
so to get to it, betta splendens costs.
overall maintenance for the aquarium varies. your main efforts will be feeding the fish once or twice a day. bettas donât eat a lot despite their size, but youâll have to figure out just how much volume to feed your fish since any feed that isnât consumed will spoil and deteriorate the water quality. water changes take 5-10 minutes and the bigger the aquarium, the less often they need to be done. in a 12 gallon tank, youâd probably want to do 20-50% every ~3 weeks before you hit that sweetspot balance (i change water about every 3 months).
total cost for starting this trial experiment: $80-$110. and then around $10-$30 a year for consumables, depending on your budget and how you want to do things.
now, breeding bettas is an entirely different beast. this is where the actual costs and work come in, because bettas, unlike most other aquarium fish, cannot be kept together in the same tank. which requires your interference to make it happen, and space⌠a lot of space⌠too much space⌠ugh. there are cheap-ish ways to do it, but space is always the issue, and if your goal is breeding. there are easier options. if you want to know about betta breeding, i can explain it in another post though.
ANYWAY, so thatâs for the bettas. Theyâre the most forgiving fish to deal with, if you just want to try keep a fish and see how it goes, which is why i detailed it for you. the next introduction level, specifically for breeding, is the guppy. and for the same reason, guppy is the second most popular fish in the hobby. but to start out breeding in a semi-serious manner, you will need 3x 15 gallon aquariums. for developing entirely new strains and explore genetics, youâll need a minimum of 8x 15 gallon tanks. guppies are dirtier and hungrier fish and need pumps, aerators and, a lot more feed. which adds to cost and more water changes. i can go into detail if youâre interested.
if you have limited space, but want to try something super easy, you could just specialize on shrimps. neocardina shrimps (aka cherry shrimps) will breed without interference, have minimal space requirements (nano tanks at 6 gallon is enough) and like the guppy and betta, come in a myriad of selectively bred colors.
and there is another interesting âtakeâ on the fish hobby, known as âsummer tubbingâ, the practice of keeping a small pond on the balcony (in the form of a large flower pot, or tub - no electronics necessary), and there are two particular species of fish perfect for this practice that will breed actively without interference. the most popular being white cloud mountain minnows and the new-to-the-west, medaka. this is my current main niche.
if your goal is conservation breeding, goodeid is another easy start.
for hardcore advanced level fish keeping, which i would not recommend to start, saltwater, predators, and large ponds is the main. pond keeping is a different beast altogether. koi/goldfish is âeasyâ as in, hardy, but it requires a lot of money, work and space.
i think the pet fish hobby is a lot less exploitative than other âpetâ niches. it still happens, of course, but itâs transitional. since breeding is a core element to the hobby as fish donât live too long and spending a lot of money on a fish that wonât breed and die within a few years is not a good incentive (koi is an exception here, they live for 200+ years if well taken care of, and part of the price is how old the koi is (the older the more expensive) and how beautiful the colors it has, it is also a factor to be an authentic japanese bred specimen). for other, less complicated species, mills do exist, and sell bulk to the pet stores, and since theyâre from mills, theyâre genetically hampered, which makes the fish âlow qualityâ as in, die much faster and is too sensitive to parameters - so theyâre usually not interesting to hobbyists and collectors. this is not saying stores arenât important, itâs the gateway for the hobby to gain more enthusiasts, and as people get involved in the hobby through exposure from a store, they soon go into the hobby trade of good and healthy specimen. which neatly splits the âfish millâ category of unethical people who need something that is easy and fast to breed to make cash, vs the hobbyists who needs something that is sturdy, genetically variable, and more healthy; focused on species that are not too difficult to breed to sustain a population at home, and maintain genetic variance by collecting new specimens from hobbyists to add to their genetic pool, which further protects wild populations. wild caught fish is usually riddled with parasites as well, which is another risk a lot of hobbyists prefer to avoid. there is just very little incentive to work with wild caught fish unless itâs a newly discovered species, in which case the goal is usually to quickly establish an aquarium strain to avoid all the complications and dangers of a wild caught species (and for mills, to figure out how to quickly mass produce them in their vats to make quick money on the ânewnessâ of the species on the market). it should also be pointed out that saltwater is far less popular because of the inherent difficulties of breeding and maintaining a saltwater tank; even if saltwater fish is usually stunningly beautiful in their wild form.
i think, for any fish hobbyists, there are generally parameters that are important.
TLDR; the hobby do have a lot of problems. but ethical/sustainable source is not one of them since serious hobbyists avoid pet stores and mills. facebook banning aquarium fish groups is damaging to the continued existence of species within the hobby and having the opposite effect by increasing the sourcing of specimen to pet stores, and thus, the profit to mills and wild caught specimen.
Guilded matches them in features and adds more gaming niched stuff like actual forums into your âserverâ.
matching Discord, or even improving on it, doesnât matter. Discord is already king. To dethrone the king, non-Discord users need to be the main target so Discord users are forced to use both, until all their contacts merge and slowly migrate to the second software over time due to more features and ease of use.
yes, and they will remain a strong presence due to âfree basicsâ, while the offering violates standard expected net neutrality, these countries are entirely capitalist and privatized and there is no way around it; meaning that the internet is intentionally too expensive for the average person, but facebook is free, so for all intents and purposes, facebook âisâ the internet in these countries. india is one of the few places where facebook withdrew free basics, and theyâre now also one of the largest userbases of the fediverse.
mastodon and similar services will never be able to achieve global adoption for as long as facebook offers âfree basicsâ, and the internet remains inaccessible due to cost.
Problem is I donât think mastodon is really a good format for groups. Lemmy is better because it actually has something you can subscribe to (and Facebook groups is basically just Facebook copying reddit these days).
iâm feeling pretty ancient in internet terms, and for me, the modern commercialized internet is just downright awful for data and resources. first of, you have all the blogs that makes things up just to try hit those keywords and get views to make profits, and secondly, lemmy (reddit, facebook groups, etc); all have the same issue for a resource community. the problem is the core design philosophy behind it. the idea of these platforms was to create a flow of information that will let the companies deliver ads to you, the entire design is around addiction to short snippets of information so you keep coming back, and so you keep scrolling. free services, like lemmy, have it âwrongâ in that way; because they are not delivering ads and thus donât need to consolidate information in the way they are. but it is a modern expectation from users, due to the corporate internet, and thereâs just no way around it to maintain modern users. but yeah, the core issues with this design is the lack of information available. i.e. if you go to any community about fish, youâll pretty much just see the same posts over and over and over again, because itâs not designed around resource discovery. i.e. on all the guppy specialized niche groups/subs, every post is essentially âis she pregnant?â, on every angelfish itâs âwhat gender his my fish?â. etc. the problem here is, people are screaming the question into the void and donât bother to try discover the answer because itâs been cleaned from the stream of data already due to the active update of the flow, like a large chat with many users, the information get quieted down. thing is, the answer to these questions which seems genuine, is the same every time. no photo is necessary for the answer, in the case of guppies, the answer is, yes, she is pregnant, becuase any guppy exposed to a male will practically immediately be pregnant and she can store sperm up to 8 months meaning that âvirgin pregnancyâ happens all the time. and as for angelfish, no, you canât tell the gender of the fish unless theyâre just about going to mate, where they expose their mating organs. my point is, while modern communities are addictive, on average, the same information is discussed day in and day out, for the sake of ad exposure. itâs a terrible design, but it is what it is, and it is what we have. though, i think mastodon (with groups, as mentioned), will be slightly better than lemmy, for organizing local communities. for larger discussions, itâs an entirely different matter - and facebook groups needing more space for discussion, usually use reddit already instead of facebook.
An actual fediverse Facebook competitor is sorely needed but I have yet to see one. Lemmy is the closest.
if we break facebook down into its modules, itâs not really that impressive.
in reality, facebook has outcompeted their purpose with instagram and most users have moved to instagram for that purpose, because âitâs not facebookâ lol. most of the damage came from their own awful algorithm of the flow hampering the information flow and keeping up to date with your friends. but the goal was to provide ârelevant dataâ for ads in scroll-by. the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was âthe place on the internet to beâ. without groups (which is a poor imitation of reddit, which is a poor imitation of forums), facebook would be dead (again, except for countries like the philippines).
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so itâs a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
in modern times, guns are useless against a militarized police and a fascist militia that both out-gun and out-number the small pocket of reason.