Interesting idea. It sounds like a federated and open source version of the “everything” apps people like Elon Musk want to create with X. The only difference would be that this is for social media.

I think there are a couple of apps that already exist that let you sign into both Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I know that Fediverse apps can communicate with each other (like you can look at and reply to Lemmy posts from a Mastodon account), but it would be even cooler and more useful if you could use your Mastodon credentials to sign into a server that ran Lemmy for example in order to get the Lemmy UI that is better suited for large, organized comment sections that are organized with lines and can be minimized instead of Mastodon style where you don’t have any of that organization. I think that an SSO-type feature like that would also negate the need for having multiple Fediverse accounts, account for Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and PeerTube, since in that scenario you wouldn’t have to create a Mastodon account if you were already on Pixelfed just to get the Mastodon UI and style of comments.

I’m honestly very happy with Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy.

The ample amount of servers to join I think scares off the worst people coming from platforms like Twitter and Instagram who only post random bs 99% of the time, and can’t be bothered to take a couple extra minutes at most to understand how Fediverse services are different from traditional social media let alone poke around to find an instance that suits them. In that way, it acts as a filter.

(I don’t mean to sound elitist, but I think all social media would be a lot better if people wanted to have enlightened discussions about things going on in the world, for example, instead of posting heavily edited photos of themselves or dancing in front of a camera. Is that really peak internet?)

What’s left are more thoughtful people that genuinely care about the mission of Fediverse platforms (like how lack of a profit incentive means there isn’t an incentive structure that leads to the enshitification of platforms), or at the very least took the time to understand how it works.

Now the only platform left to conquer is YouTube.

I’m glad their appealing. I mean the judge’s son literally works for Microsoft. Talk about fair and impartial.

-https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/will-the-biggest-tech-merger-of-all?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web -https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The reason ActiBliz + MS deal it is getting scrutinized more is because Lina Khan became head of the FTC, and she looks at mergers and acquisitions with the same dislike that everyone had towards Standard Oil monopoly and AT&T monopoly back in the day.

The Obama Administration had a very lax antitrust policy. For example, they approved the Ticketmaster + Live Nation merger despite it clearly being a vertical merger that gave a single company control of the majority of both the venues concerts were held at and the tickets being sold for those concerts, ultimately resulting in the Taylor Swift fiasco that was in the news a couple months ago. Monopolies like Ticketmaster are complacent because there is no one to compete against and therefore no reason to make things better for the consumer. Things have changed because the head of the FTC (and many other government agencies) changes when a new president gets elected.

People like to only focus on how prices change as a result of mergers, but until the 1980s everyone including judges also considered the political and social cost of mergers, in addition to the monetary cost to consumers. Maybe if we continued to do that and didn’t largely stop in the 1980s we would not have too-big-to-fail banks or a mobile app store duopoly.

Absolutely. It teaches you everything you need to know so don’t worry even if you haven’t played Pikmin before.

Microsoft needs to be stopped from acquiring ActiBliz and broken up. Otherwise they’ll become even more impossible to regulate and be held accountable like banks.

While Nintendo’s hardware is less powerful on every level, I think that the majority of their games have lots of effort put into them. While Nintendo definitely has had some horrible games (Mario Party 9, 10, Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival, Mario sports since the mid 2010s) or just plain average games (see New Super Mario Bros starting with the Wii entry) and their stance on emulation is horrible, I honestly think they put out some of the most creative games ever made (see Splatoon, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario 64, Pikmin 1, 2, 3, 4, F-Zero GX). At least give them a point for not putting microtransactions in their $60, now $70 games like other publishers (looking at you Activision, EA, Microsoft).

As for their hardware, I would rather them put their games on PC (so I don’t have to rip them myself). I like that they try new things with their hardware that few others do (see Wii motion controls (although a bit overdone at first), 3D gaming (3DS), a console that you can take anywhere (sure they weren’t the first to attempt it but they were the first to pull it off)). That being said I would much rather also be able to play their games on my Android or Steam Deck. The only reason I’m excited for their new hardware is to see what (if anything) new they will try, and for them to jump at least a decade closer to where the industry is at in terms of computing power.

Yay to new Nintendo console. Nay to ActiBliz + M$.