They are still going to be tracking you. That isn’t going away.
They just won’t use the tracking for the explicit reason of creating ads for you. But that’s only because you are paying for no ads.
I guarantee the data is logged for all other purposes, and that the data is logged for future ad usage if you ever unsubscribe.
Secondly this doesn’t necessarily equate the profit from your specific ads. This is the result of a legal battle within the EU. That’s the only reason it exists. The price is determined as ‘high enough to not get into more legal trouble’.
Meta already demonstrably does this. I deleted my real Facebook in like 2016. Around 2019-2020, I created a new burner account to browse Marketplace with nearly all fake info expect my name, phone, and email. And lo and behold all of my friend suggestions are people I know and mostly were on the old account. The most charitable I can imagine is that those suggestion had me in their contacts which they agree to share with Facebook (which is problematic af imo) but it is extremely likely they just retain all of data especially since many of the people I was suggested have never had my current number/email.
You deleted your real Facebook account… but did you delete the anonymous shadow account…?
It’s not that Facebook hasn’t deleted the data from your real account, it’s that they keep tons of “anonymous” shadow accounts, each one of us probably has a dozen of them from different interactions with Facebook, and your new account most likely got suggestions from getting paired with those.
From me? Of course not. Unfortunately, I do live in society and do have to share my contact info with others, and I’m guessing the vast majority of people just spam the “okay” button as Facebook asks for contact access, mic access, camera access, access to your colon, etc.
There is this neat horrifying thing the Facebook app does by tracking your location and figuring out where you work in order to suggest colleagues you can add as well as I have noticed just tracking if you happen to be near another device with a unique account on it.
The huge swath of very intimate data they are collecting on us is so not ok and they have all kinds of creepy stuff they don’t even admit too.
Oh the data will absolutely be used for ads elsewhere. It’s just how the ad game works. It’s all interconnected. I also don’t think it’s inherently bad, it’s just what it is. It’s how targeted ads work. They will be stopping that. They just also won’t have to buy data themselves about you because they’re not showing you ads anymore.
I also think this subscription model has run into criticism from EU legislators/regulators as well, which will have to be decided upon. Basically Meta isn’t out of the doghouse yet.
Really, I’d say strip Meta of all its assets and dissolve the whole thing, maybe try some of the heads for all the shit they’ve pulled in the ICC? Like failing to act on genocides or actively working to incite mass violence, political unrest, etcetera.
I think this is much more likely what they think people will pay. And/or what they think a percentage of people will pay that will cover costs/lost revenue from other users leaving. They have basically zero incentive to make it a 1-to-1 replacement.
I've been off of all social media for about a decade, but just yesterday i got a dm from someone from my past so i went and checked it out and then I checked a bunch of other stuff there too and my mental state instantly spiraled into a terrible place. Man that shit is toxic like nuclear waste.
It’s not talking to people that’s damaging. Being able to socialize and discuss via media is healthy.
The damaging component is when an algorithm pushes unhealthy content because it drives engagement.
No one set out to create a rage/depression/anxiety algorithm, but those emotions tend to drive engagement better than more positive experiences. So if engagement is the goal, you get destructive systems.
Removing the algorithm does a lot for helping people engage with their peers and society at large in a more constructive context.
Most definitions of social media are some form of “sharing content for the purpose of socializing in a public manner”. I wouldn’t think having a real life identity linked to your account would be a requirement for a social network. Why wouldn’t reddit, lemmy, or even an old school forum be considered social media? You’re sharing and discussing content on a community platform. I dunno, just something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’m using lemmy more.
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:
Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.
Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.
Lemmy fits those criteria very well, and there’s nothing regarding anonymous profiles vs identified profiles. It may not be the only definition of social media, but it’s comprehensive and sensible.
Then email is also social media, Google docs is social media, phpBB is social media, Amazon review sections are social media, even Pornhub comment sections are social media, and so on…
If Lemmy fits the criteria, then so does 95% of the internet. Not a very useful definition, in that case.
Yeah, I guess under that definition any web-based application that allows for a person to create an account/profile and generate and post content is a form of social media. That makes sense when you consider that they’re media that allow for social interaction.
What’s your definition of social media? Genuinely interested because I’m not sure that there even is a single definition that can be agreed upon.
I think the whole public vs anonymous profiles thing doesn’t really stack up, as I can create profiles on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok etc and provide no identifying information about myself, much as I do on Lemmy. I can also choose to add a profile picture and info about myself to identify myself on Lemmy if I choose, much as people do on other social media.
If your definition only includes those platforms that force you fully identify yourself in order to maintain a profile, that list will be pretty small and exclude a lot of sites that the vast majority would consider to be social media, including the ones I’ve named above.
You might be able to create profiles anonymously, but you can’t use those services anonymously. They only work if you have other people added as friends or whatever, unlike content aggregators like lemmy or reddit, where you can be as anonymous as you want and still interact with all features of the site.
I think that narrows it down enough. If you can use all features of the platform without personally knowing anyone on it, it’s not social media.
I did too and, while the benefit are higher than the loss, I usually feel really left out from one kind of partecipation to society and it’s a bit sad.
They profit from user-generated content and monetize your data, and now they’re asking for your money to keep creating content for them.
You should walk away from these toxic platforms. In reality, there are tons of excellent software options that do not collect and sell your data while allowing you to use their services and protecting your privacy at the same time. Mastodon (I guess most of you have already heard of it), Element, SimpleX Chat, WireMin, Session, etc. I can keep listing them all day.
I’m pretty sure he means other people at his uni use instagram and the likes. Signal/Simplex/etc. is great, but at the end of the day, sometimes you don’t have a choice and must use what everybody else is using.
It’s not because everybody should be using these apps that they will. If you have a group project and people want to communicate on messenger, that’s what you are gonna do. Not doing so would make you insufferable and no one would want to work with someone that imposes his choices on the group.
AFAIK it has something to do with the weird rerouting they do during the login process. I had issues using containers in Firefox for a while, too. Though nowadays it works, both on mobile and on desktop.
Linux has gotten great over the years and keeps improving while windows gets worse and worse every day. This has been going on for many years now.
I switched already and suggest you give it a shot as well. It’s honestly much easier than windows if you know the basics and understand how things are done there.
Not every distro of Linux has gotten better, for the most part this comment is innacurate. That said, I have generally had the same experience here, but I use arch btw.
I just wanted to talk out of my ass here and drop a joke lol. I think it was the HC Linux people disagreeing that not all distro have gotten better. It was bs fluff for the meme lol
I play mosty either indy games or just older games on an older gaming laptop (geforce 1070m based HP Omen) and Steam/Linux Mint work pretty great. Outer Wilds works even better in Linux now that I’ve begun using CoreCtrl to disable CPU power throttling. Otherwise, it runs about like it did on Windows. The MCC runs flawlessly. Recently purchased No Man’s Sky and it runs pretty well and is actually incredibly smooth–no idea how that one runs in Windows because I’ve been just using Linux full-time for maybe two months now.
There is some weirdness like having to process Vulcan Shades before games boot up which can be annoying, but it hasn’t discouraged me yet. You can also skip that and the only difference is there might be a bit of stuttering for the first bit of game play. After going back to Windows to compare performance, I think it does this stuttering thing anyways?
Shader compiling is just a graphical technique. DX12 does it too. Just that, Vulkan is nice enough to tell you a bit about it, and Steam has preemptive compiling, which runs most of the compiling before running the game precisely to reduce stuttering during gameplay. If you recall when The Last of Us remake launched, a lot of people were reporting up to an hour of “Loading” time at the menu before the game was playable on first run, and some were even reporting compiling on every single run of the game just as long. That was a bug with DX12 Shader compiling and it was prominent in both consoles and Windows. It’s not a Vulkan thing, nor particular about Linux. That is just how graphically intensive games are made nowadays.
I do prefer Arch. I have it on multiple systems. I prefer it because once it’s settled and it’s working the way you want, it will stay that way for years. Even when you’re updating it regularly.
If you don’t choose arch, consider bookmarking the arch wiki because it’s the best Linux resource out there
I like Arch as well but there is a higher learning curve than with other distro and if you go for Arch go for EndeavorOS or another Arch derivative (except Manjaro).
However, if you’re looking for something to let you game. Nobara is a distro that comes with all the gaming comparability layers and drivers preinstalled. It’s based on Fedora so it’s relatively up to date but not rolling like Arch.
What would make Nobara better for gaming than Mint? All of my Steam games have worked fine. Do the things you’re talking about matter for games that are not in Steam/Proton? Just wondering!
I mean at the end of the day it’s all Linux so it’s not so different and just a minor convenience.
This is just for Fedora: comes with non-free audio/video codecs, non-free driver repos.
For other distro: It comes with nVidea drivers, WINE, OBS, Blender, Proton, Lutris, and Flatpak set up/preinstalled. (drivers detected on install I believe) there’s also package and kernel tweaks to boost gaming performance, supposedly.
In comparison to Mint: Fedora packages and kernel versions get updated a little faster than Ubuntu/Debian based distros.
So Nobara takes a lot of the “pain” out of system setup for people who are new to Linux and gamers/streamers.
I haven’t used it personally though I’m currently running EndeavorOS and using a SteamDeck for gaming.
I am new to Linux and never used it regularly before a couple months ago, but I’d recommend just going with Linux Mint to start off. I don’t know much about Arch, but from all the jokes I see on Lemmy, I get the impression it may be a more advanced distro for people who know what they’re doing? I wanted to try PopOS! because people said it was good for gaming, but the install wasn’t as streamlined for a dual boot Windows/Linux setup.
Linux Mint just kind of works and installed super fast. And my Windows partition is still intact and functional (but I’m wondering if I even need it tbh). My only holdup is Microsoft Office. I still haven’t tried to get that working inside of Linux, but if it’s possible, then I will certainly delete my Windows install.
But anyways, don’t over think it. Just do Linux Mint and then after a while, you’ll be able to understand why or if you should consider another distro I would guess!
I don’t have numbers, but I’ve seen comments/reviews that suggest they’re all within a percent or two in terms of frame rate. Like, how much thought should someone put in to getting 101 fps instead of 100 fps, you know? After using Mint for a bit, I’m probably going to stick with this for a year or two before trying out other distros, if I even feel the need. I think there is also value in giving a couple of them a try as you learn more.
It’s kinda like installing windows, but the process is way faster during the actual install, and the initial setup. The OS is much smaller and took maybe 20 minutes to install after I got my partitions set up properly. After Linux is booted up, every program I needed to get going was easily located in the built in software package downloader. I didn’t have to go to NVIDIA’s website to download drivers because they were already accessible from the built-in driver manager. Telegram, Steam, and whatever popular software you want is just a quick search away and a button click from being installed as a flatpak application. Firefox was already installed. It didn’t ask me to log in to a Microsoft account before I could move on to using my computer.
From my understanding, there’s definitely driver support all the way around. I have a 1070 in my laptop, so it’s old enough that everything is probably about as developed and compatible as it can be. Theres an open source driver available, but most people say to simply stick with the proprietary Nvidia one, which is what I’ve done. The OS/driver manager should pick out the most stable and best tested release version for your system. I would guess all the distros can use the Nvidia drivers just fine, it’s just a matter of getting it installed one way or another, if the distro doesn’t have a driver manager. I’m just the newbie, so, I don’t have a lot of experience.
Mmhmm. I’ve started doing this and it does work fine. I think I saw a comment once that noted they compile faster in-game anyways. So that makes me feel better about skipping lol
+1 for indie games. I really think we’re living in the golden age of indie gaming with tools like Godot, Unreal, and Unity (yes, yes, I know, but Unity is probably still the most popular engine for now). As indies get empowered more and more by tools like this, and AAA studios get greedier and greedier, I can’t find any reason to play anything that isn’t from an indie game developer.
And most, nearly even all indie games work great on Linux, often even better than their Windows counterparts.
Fantastic - made the jump a month ago. I don’t play FPS games. Those are the ones that have trouble running on Linux due to anti-cheast software, but the vast majority of my 600 steam games run with no issues it all - at sometimes running even better than on windows.
For example division 2 was sluggish on win11 on my Lenovo y540 (integrated GeForce whatever gaming laptop card) with 16gig of ram, now that I swapped over to Pop!_os - it doesn’t lag at all.
I mostly play single player games, but guild wars 2 2 and ff14 work great too if you are an MMO fan.
Great, I play a lot on it and the only game I had to use windows for so far was titanfall 2 because it kept stuttering on linux and troubleshooting stutter is hard.
In my experience, much of the studdering comes from the desktop environments. If you’re using Gnome, try KDE or one of the others. If it changes then it’s probably the Compositor settings. It’s a pain but once you find the right settings, oh yeah it’s great
Thanks, I use KDE on X already (thank you nvidia) and find gnome’s design absolutely asinine, so I’ll try to fiddle around with the compositor settings.
Mildly inconvenient at worst unless certain anti cheat software is being used. At best, you can run games on Linux that your machine may not be able to handle on windows because distros that use more resources than windows are rare. Steam on Linux has proton built into it and it just works once you set it to run through it. You might have gpu driver trouble with Nvidia but it’s a maybe issue that happens less and less.
I play Baldurs Gate 3 on it and it turned out the issues I thought might be linux related were hardware, when I fixed it it worked perfectly.
Not a gamer myself but from reading it used to be “this is a limited list of games that will work in Linux” and now it’s a “this is a limited list of games that will not work”, with a lot of thanks to valve, pop-os!, etc.
I have been a Linux gamer for the past 10 years. I haven’t booted into Windows to play a video game in 8.
When I started out, it was very much a question of “Here is the list of games that work on Linux.” You had to look for that Steam logo next to the Windows or sometimes Apple logo on the Steam page, and there are some games I would have played years earlier had that logo been there. With Proton, it has switched to “Here is a list of the games that don’t work on Linux.” Because most just do, with the very notable exception of competitive shooters, because something something anticheat.
I often hear that games actually run better on Linux than they do on Windows, except the newer whiz-bang features don’t work. Give a recent example, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 runs at a significantly higher framerate on Linux than Windows, but DLSS, HDR and RTX aren’t available.
Let me tell you the tales of two gamers on Linux:
My tale: I was disgusted with Windows 8.1, I had been learning some Linux because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi with my ham radio stuff, so I went…why don’t I try switching? This was circa 2014. There was exactly one game in my Steam library that just could not be persuaded to run and that was Sleeping Dogs.
There have been a few games I’ve wanted to try that refused to run in some way or another; Heave Ho! by Devolver Digital…the demo ran fine, had a good time with it. Bought the game, and the UI on the player select screen didn’t work. Grow Up or Grow Home (one is a sequel to the other, I forget which it was) launched, but the character didn’t respond to any controls. Oh and Fallout: New Vegas launched one of those Windows-style autorun screens then asked me to put in the DVD. I bought it from Steam. And refunded it.
I generally avoid AAA games, I don’t play many online multiplayer games, I do play multiplayer games with friends, stuff like Stardew Valley or Unrailed, but I don’t go play with random people online, those just are not fun to me. I tend to prefer more indie stuff, more nerdy stuff, like I’ve got hundreds of hours in Factorio and Satisfactory, both work fine. I think it just so happens that I’m into games that are likely to be well supported on Linux. Antichamber, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, every Zachtronics game I’ve tried, Undertale, Subnautica, these all run great.
My cousin: had an aging Dell upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 on an “optane boosted” hard disk drive, starting to run pretty sluggish. Swapping out the hard disk and optane module for an SSD and attempting to install Win10 on bare metal just wouldn’t work, it kept throwing cryptic errors, so to get the machine to work at all I put Linux Mint on it.
She has more mainstream tastes than I do, lots of Bethesda and EA games. Funnily enough, I found that the third-party launchers were the real problem. The Sims 4 ran pretty well on Linux…Origin barely does. Minecraft support on Linux is actually worsening with time as a result of Microsoft’s involvement, but at least the Java edition does currently run.
In brief, I have observed a very stark inverse relationship between Linux compatibility of games, and the size/corporateness/evilness of the developer.
I’m not really worried about stuff like that because it’s a self-bootstrapping cycle. As more end users adopt Linux, more effort will be put into supporting it.
With the release of the steam deck Linux gaming has gotten a lot better and more support since their steam OS is a branch of Debian. A lot of games now support Linux gaming more than before.
Pretty great actually. Not as out of the box as on Windows but almost there. Firstly you get a vastly different experience depending on if you are using Steam. Since I have my entire library on Steam I can’t say anything about other stores. There’s imo 3 points where the experience still differs:
1 - you have to enable Proton as the default compatability tool, Valve has a guide for it and the setting is pretty straightforward to find.
2 - Most games just work now but a few don’t in those cases things like protondb.com are an enormous help.
3 - Mods are hit and miss (Steam Workshop works fine) depending on the game, for Cyberpunk for example I had to mess with the Proton Config a bit but there were guides for it. However since we are now in a niche of a niche (modding a game running proton) you’re likely to run into unexplored territory
mildlyinfuriating
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