I agree that this is needlessly nuanced, but it is possible. If you have a Mac you can transfer files between Mac and an iPad wirelessly or with a cable. iPads can also connect to external storage devices or Windows PCs if they are sharing the files. But it isn’t like Android where you can basically just plug it into a Windows or Linux machine and have direct instant access to its entire directory.

A bit pedantic, but it is also industry leading in revenue/profit. Even in Europe and parts of Asia. A first glance it is a pretty “duh” statement. But companies, like Samsung, see Apple’s price action and then move in unison toward it. Sure, you can get plenty of phones for relatively cheap these days. Often times with huge drawbacks or a lot of additional spying built in (or “features” like advertisements in notifications). Or you pay for it in other ways, such as not receiving more than a year’s worth of updates.

I feel this as well. I’m in a mixed device household, and sharing images and videos between each other is a real pain. Nobody wants to mess around with going to an iCloud or Google Photos link and grabbing images or video. In the USA, few people want to use third party messaging apps. My family certainly doesn’t. My kid’s friends certainly don’t, and so everyone sticks to iMessage.

Because iMessage really is the best in this region given what is actually used by non-outliers. I use both Android and iOS, Windows and Mac. There’s no comparison. iMessage has more features than Google’s solution. Google’s “RCS” is better than SMS/MMS but isn’t equivalent to iMessage. And cross-device support for it is a joke. Samsung has their own little bridge if you buy entirely into their ecosystem–apps included (sorry, Google Messenger). But there isn’t the same identical experience that happens like with Apple: iMessage on iPhone is the same as on iPad is the same as on Mac. No web QR codes to scan, no weird per-device limitations, it really just works. Handoff works like magic. I know, cliche, but Google doesn’t have anything that competes with the feature set. iMessage is so much more than group chats and text messages and pictures like Android users tend to characterize.

Google has no room to call out Apple for its b.s. with iMessage, either; Google has its own proprietary messaging apps. They’ve tried several times to replicate iMessage and lock people in. Their latest is RCS, which is really a misnomer because Google took the actual RCS standard and made it proprietary. That’s why there aren’t third party apps outside of a tiny number of outliers with special business arrangements with Google (such as Samsung). That’s why Google’s entire campaign to “shame” Apple (really, remind iPhone users of the pain of interacting with Android users) doesn’t go anywhere. Google is just as proprietary as iMessage. Google requires all traffic route through Google’s proprietary Jibe middleware and cloud infrastructure.

At this point I doubt Google would actually share their proprietary RCS with Apple given that they don’t share it with anyone else except Samsung, and only then because Samsung was moving to fork Android (or abandon it entirely) after Google got into the hardware business. We know Google has a private API for their RCS implementation and that they actively choose not to share it, because they’ve accidentally leaked it before and XDA devs picked up on it. There are a million SMS/MMS apps available, not so much for “RCS.”

People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that’s the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn’t or can’t pay the price. But software development is hard work, especially if it isn’t a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That’s the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can’t throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.

I’ll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn’t like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn’t like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.

Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.

Makes no sense. Mozilla has no horse in the advertising race. But Google does. Almost all of Google’s profits are from ads. Ads keep the entire Alphabet house of cards afloat.

But not Mozilla. The largest connection there is them being paid for default lt search engine.

I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

and since the state was not democratic

How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.

But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.

And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.

Different != undemocratic.

I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them

Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?

Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).

The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.

We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.

America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.

Adding onto that, the quality of Reddit content [in my former subreddits] has slid dramatically in my opinion. Sure, those niche communities will exist and persist for a while. But, as more tech pros move to the Fediverse I have to imagine that is where a lot of information will reside going forward. Hopefully it becomes or remains discoverable. I get some glimmers of this happening with the various Steam Deck communities here. It is already happening with the various programming communities.

I think a far more likely thing to happen is that you get people scrapping the Fediverse for content to repost on Reddit, like what happens with Facebook and Instagram users scraping TikTok for content to repost. Social networks these days seem surprisingly sticky now that it isn’t just a place where all your friends are at.

There are already some bots that essentially do that (perhaps not with that particular approach). Unfortunately, I think it has the opposite intended effect: organic growth doesn’t seem to take all that well.

Wait until the non-technical reddit exiles learn about defederation and start whipping themselves up into frenzies trying to purge things they mildly disagree with or flat out don’t like. Just like the good old days on reddit with banning people for participating in verboten subreddits.

Keep the worst of reddit and Twitter off lemmy, folks. Plenty of platforms for those types.

Most people don’t do that. Look at the donor count for Lemmy World vs DAU.

LJ (dev of Sync) has had a patreon for years. The patrons pale in comparison to the people who used Sync for Reddit, and I’m sure Lemmy as well. Patron-types are outliers among outliers.

If it is impossible to make a living and work on these apps with either reasonable app pricing or no ads, then why is Sync the only app for Lemmy with these strings attached?

Sync is a “professional” app. The others are mostly hobbyists. That’s the ultimate difference. Same as with Apollo. You had a bunch of open source reddit clients, but a hobby piece of software will seldom outshine a professional product. Sometimes it happens, but that’s the exception not the norm. Sync has been incredibly stable for me over the last day. Memmy on my phone and Connect haven’t been. No shade to the devs, but devs approach a solution differently when that is how they support themselves. Passion can only carry a project so far, speaking as a dev myself.

I’ve noticed that the people losing their minds over Sync and solo software devs trying to make a living while keeping apps accessible, aren’t the ones beating down the doors to contribute their time and skill and labor for open source. Most of them don’t strike me as devs at all. I’m used to it. It’s the lemmy equivalent of your one family member asking you to make them an app for free at a family Christmas.

People that are passionate about FOSS/FLOSS should definitely use those things. And support them financially. And contribute. But somehow the meta has become to dogpile on the first major third party app for our community that had a lot of users on reddit and which makes onboarding easy.

The key detail you are missing is that most people that left reddit did so on the backs of closed source third party apps. That’s what kicked off the entire firestorm of events. The reality was that, of those who used third party apps, most used closed sourced solutions.

FOSS is great. FLOSS is even better. People should support projects they identify with, just like people should support their home Lemmy instance via community funding. But far too many of the argument I’m seeing against Sync and others basically boils down to “we shouldn’t pay for software,” like our [software engineer] labor is just something to be had for free.

Closed source third party apps are no threat to Lemmy. The failings of reddit cannot happen to Lemmy so long as one instance does not come to define Lemmy in such a way that they can self-isolate and essentially turn into a proprietary model itself. Let’s all recall that Reddit was, once upon a time, open source.

Third party apps are about choice. I hardly consider someone using a closed source third party app–in a sea of many, many FOSS versions–a loss of freedom or an abusive relationship. Come on, that’s very hyperbolic. And I’d wager 99% of people can’t verify that trust even if they wanted to since most people don’t understand code, let alone software development practices. They just take the word of random strangers whom they have no right trusting saying “yeah it looks good.”

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.

A huge component of the fear that I’ve seen is how one large player can usurp standards. It keeps happening. Why do you think Meta reached out to some of the largest people in the Fediverse and tried (pretty successfully) to get them to sign NDAs? Only one stood their ground and went transparent about it, and that was Kev at Fossotodn.

I don’t think valid opposition needs to assume some grand evil plan to destroy the Fediverse from Meta. Meta’s mere presence is enough to threaten the standard and our communities, good intentions or otherwise.

A lot of “Reporters” are just influencers at this point. They mostly stuck with Twitter so they could maintain their reach essentially.

Now Threads is out, and all these writers are flocking there and won’t shut the fuck up about it. Just yesterday TheVerge had like 7 out of 10 stories dedicated to Threads. It was all over my news feed elsewhere, too. Journalists I follow on Mastodon also won’t shut the fuck up about it in an attempt to port some users over to Threads.

Same with TikTok creators. Even FOSS (supposedly) enthusiasts are hiding behind this aura of “evangelizing” the Fediverse to Threads users as their reason for being there. But they are trying very hard to get their followers to also follow them on threads.