It all depends on your tolerance.

FireSticks are inherently easier to tinker with. But Amazon bends you over with shoving ads and spyware up your ass at every opportunity. It is baked into the UI design itself. It is very advertising-forward, with everything else designed around ads. And even the 4K max lags at times.

AppleTV really requires an iPhone to set up optimally. And it is locked down with no clear jail break at this time for most people unless you’re willing to solder (or if I’ve missed a new flaw in an update which opened the door programmatically). But Apple TV is fast and smooth, with no inherent ads of its own. It is honestly over powered for its purpose, probably because it can also play a fair number of iOS games.

Chrome Cast with Google TV is a fucking mess. It is severely under powered to the point of lagging. It has half baked ideas like profiles which don’t change anything. And it has ads as the focus of the design just like FireStick.

But you’re going to pay a subscription if you go with Apple TV and want something like Infuse. Jellyfin and Plex, of course, don’t require it.

And despite what people say, Stremio is absolute dogshit on a FireStick because of its mobile-centric UI.

If you plan to use a server like Plex and Jellyfin, all of them work—but Apple TV works best. If you need anything else out of it, probably the fire stick if you use a pihole to stop it from phoning home for more ads constantly.

Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.

Like tablet-friendly UI.

And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.

Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.

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.

Here’s the post from the official Calckey account. Mali is, indeed, seizing domain names. Makes me wonder what is happening with Lemmy.ml. I really don’t want to get involved with Matrix just to find out.

LemmyGrad.ml is still up, though. For now.

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.

I agree in spirit, but Meta is a known bad actor and wrecking ball that ran actual psyops against its own users and their networks just to see if they could make people depressed. They also engage in extensive, worldwide election interference to upend democracies. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

This article lays out all the problems with the wait and see approach. We’ve been here before, unfortunately, and it only has a happy ending for the huge corporations looking to end us.

Edit: for those looking to get away from Mastodon’s main instances, give Fosstodon a look. Meta approached its admin with NDAs just like they did with Ruud, but refused it and published the email for openness. Here it is, by the way.

I’m positive that most of that reporting is outrage farming and anecdotes. Take the really famous example—people not dating people if they use an Android device. It originated with the NYPost. The NYPost is a rightwing gossip and conspiracy rag that makes its money with outrage farming.

And other outlets just uncritically picked it up and went with it. Now it is part of the assumed zeitgeist.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it happens. My Android-using family needles me constantly for using an iPhone and Macs. It is very annoying. But it isn’t exclusionary.

What’s exclusionary are what Apple and Meta do with iMessage and Whatsapp, respectively, and what Google does with what they call “RCS,” which is actually a proprietary fork of RCS entirely reliant on their proprietary middleware such that Google can gate keep (which is why there aren’t a slew of RCS apps out there; Google doesn’t allow access just like Apple doesn’t). These companies need to be broken up and whatever remains should be forced to create/adopt a standard and stick to it.

I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.

A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.