Better is mostly subjective, so take this with a grain of salt.
But it isn’t better, not yet. And it may never be.
But, let’s loop you in, Odd one (it’s a book reference, not an insult)
So, Sync started as a reddit app. As you know, reddit fucked third party apps, and made a series of insulting statements to users and mods, generating an exodus that led some people to lemmy.
On reddit, when it was fresh news, many of those app devs that had a reddit presence were asked if they would migrate their app to something else, with the most common request being lemmy (the only option that had an API worth mentioning at the time).
Out of those, Sync was one of the top five android apps. For some, it was reddit, they’d chosen sync and used nothing else.
Thus, you had weeks of build-up after Mr Dawson announced he was going to migrate. Serious hype.
So, the app drops. People check it out. Those unfamiliar with the app from reddit are surprised to find it has ads. Those familiar with it were aware that ad monetization was part of how Mr Dawson made a living. The rest was through various ad free versions, and “ultra”. Ultra was a service that added features to the app on reddit. Here, it doesn’t really add as much because some of what it does isn’t server based, so a subscription fee for those specific features isn’t as attractive. A one time fee has been added to remove ads, and the price point is a matter of upset as well.
Secondary to that, the app is closed source. Again, anyone familiar with the app from reddit would know this. It was known when very fervent requests to migrate were made.
As you may be aware, lemmy runs high to open source advocates, privacy advocates, and general mistrust of anything that doesn’t at least give a polite nod to those principles.
And that’s where the drama starts.
With all of that in mind, you have segments of the lemmy population that are hyped to have an early version of a familiar and well executed app. Those folks are surprised at the sheer venom that has been directed to the app and its developer. A segment of those are very vocal in their defense of the app. Some cross the line into being jerks. There’s another segment that dislikes the app on those principles, another that just don’t like it as an app (or prefer others), and there’s the small but noisy and rude segment that hates the app.
That’s where the drama centers. It is magnified by the fact that the more energetic the opinion is, the more likely people are to voice it, and the inverse.
Most lemmings don’t care much at all, but they’re not emotionally driven, and/or would rather just avoid drama.
My bias: I think it’s rather rude to throw nastiness at a developer that was practically (and in a few cases literally) begged to port his app for lemmy. One can object to decisions made in a civil manner. Sync was not my app of choice, but I found it to be a solid back-up, and Mr Dawson to be a fairly good example of how a developer should communicate.
Now, my opinion on sync for lemmy, as it currently exists. This is pure opinion, and should not be taken as anything else. While I despise ads, it’s a case of “hate the game, not the player”. I understand why app developers use ads, and I can’t say I blame them. The price Mr Dawson has set for a one time ad removal is fair. Regardless of what level of income can be expected from ads, that income is continuous as long as the app is used. The fee represents a reasonable amount for an app that is likely to remain useful just as it is for years.
Now, it is not up to feature parity with core lemmy tools. There are plenty of apps further along in that regard. It is, however, a very well crafted UI and has a long history of being actively maintained as well as moved forward over time. That last assumes the developer doesn’t throw up his hands as a “no win” situation and walk away. I doubt that will be the case, Mr Dawson is a pro. Wouldn’t blame him if he did though, some of the comments directed at him would have been nasty on reddit; here, they’re so far beyond acceptable it’s disgusting. Lemmy is supposed to be better than reddit in that regard.
I don’t do tl;drs because it ain’t that fucking hard to read, but to kinda close things out, it can be summed up as a massive amount of confusion about exactly what the app was, is, and should be.
This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it’s worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.
There’s definitely a conflict between “paid closed source app” and “FOSS fediverse”, and there’s arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy “useable” in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn’t quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.
I get the idea that the FOSS outrage is not 100% honest. Not to say that they don’t hold a strong pro-FOSS stance, but I think it’s fueled by something else.
I think a lot of people are just plain annoyed with the way the Sync fans suddenly took over discussion all over Lemmy, and the FOSS position was an easy one to “legitimize” their opposition to this new crowd.
It’s pretty normal to have people push back when there’s such a vocal crowd about something. What’s frustrating is how it’s so polarizing that if anyone wants to express a dissenting opinion and have good faith discussion, they’re usually lumped in with the massive circlejerk on one side or the other.
Worldcoin is a company who’s goal is to use AI to be able to identify a person by taking a picture of their eyes.
They are a for profit company which is extremely bad, and they have also started doing things which can be seen as very bad : like installing orbs as work of art which can take pictures and scan the eyes of people who gaze into the lens of the ball. news.artnet.com/…/worldcoin-orb-ai-2341500
Their “objective” of what they are saying is getting a way to identify a person. However they give to each person who dies it their eye hash, and 1 crypto coin, I think named after them. However them being a for profit company is very scary as we cannot know what they are doing with that data and if they will sell it or not.
I may see the usefulness of being able to identify someone. If that picture is real or not. Being able to unlock your phone in a more secure way…
However, if that company starts to sell the identity of the people which volunteered in the ai training, then it’s a huge privacy concern for those people.
Well if their goal was to train an AI capable to be integrated in mobiles phones to be able to scan the eyes of people to unlock it, then it would have been a great goal.
Tho I am not sure of what they really want.
Maybe a a way to get data and sell that data later. They have the hash for the eyes of the people who got scanned. So in the future maybe they can sell that (or get hacked), and advertising companies could use that for tracking people with theit AI.
Maybe what they are trying is getting a lot of noise to increase the value of their crypto (no idea what crypto and identity have in common) and do a quick cash grab with people buying in it.
Maybe their real goal is making an ai capable to identify everyone and sell that ai as said above in security devices but not in advertising.
Who knows. But right now the way they are collecting the data, is pretty bad.
So that game developers don’t have to rebuild all the rules for their game universes for every game, they use Unity which is one of several products that offers pre-built frameworks to build their games on top of.
This offers several advantages, the main ones being:
You don’t reinvent the wheel or the physics for angular momentum for every game, so development time is massively reduced.
You only develop your game once, but can compile it for use on many platforms. So a single developer can be writing code that can be used for the PC, Play Station, XBox and so on.
Skills learned in one game’s development transfer to quicker development in your next game.
The way that Unity were paid historically was that you paid a subscription for each developer that was using it to write your game. There were several tiers of subscription, that met the needs of developers in small indies right through to huge multinationals.
It didn’t matter how well your game sold, your cost was limited to the subscriptions you paid for. And you released your game bundled with the framework’s ‘run-time’ from Unity that supported your in-game universe.
This changed recently when the executives at Unity had the spiffing idea of charging 20 US cents per installation of the run-time too, while also killing off the cheapest tier of the model subscription.
This meant that the indies suddenly have to pay more for each subscription, and they get to pay a fee for every installation of their game - not every sale - every installation. So every pirated copy - extra charge, every second install on the Steam Deck - extra charge…
What extra has Unity done to deserve the extra cash? In a nutshell - nothing. They just decided to unilaterally change their terms and take a bigger chunk of the pie for doing nothing more at the expense of the customers making the mistake of building on top of their product and being tied into their ecosystem.
As an analogy, imagine buying a season ticket to travel on the train to work each day, you pay €200/month for unlimited travel between the station closest to home and closest to work. This carries on for several years, and then suddenly the rail operator announces a ‘communal rolling stock fee’, every time you use your ticket there’s a €1/passenger fee for each passenger boarding the same train as you whenever you travel! The more busy the train, the bigger the amount you have to pay!
What was a fixed monthly fee could be anything, you have no way to budget the cost, and you have to trust the same people screwing you to get the count right each time with no way of being certain they got it right…
What extra work is the rail operator doing, nothing they are just charging more for the same service.
And what did you do to deserve this? Nothing you just trusted the company you were dealing with to remain reasonable, and not invent bullshit charges.
Back to Unity…
As a result a lot of developers in late stage development plan to switch to a competitor for their next game. Those in early stages are looking at starting over. And there have been reports of publishers walking away from deals with developers because of the unknown risks of a new game because it was developed using Unity.
The easily predictable end result: many if not all of Unity’s customers are vocally incandescent with justified rage.
TLDR: Software library company got greedy; they shat in the pool and tried to charge their customers a ‘poop in the pool’ fee, and every last one of their customers is very (very) loudly incredulous at such ass-hattery.
Curious what resources you’ve consulted that state Unity can or will charge for every pirated copy. How is the feasible and by what legal mechanisms would they enforce this?
I’m truly a neutral party, I don’t play many games but I understand what’s going on here a little bit.
You clearly have a jaded viewpoint to it for better or worse and I’m not sure that’s warranted and is a bit disingenuous.
Unity is a game engine and a bunch of ancillary services, analytics and tracking and what not. It’s been free to use and publish games with as long as your company revenue was under a certain amount. Over that amount and you’d have to buy a license for I think about $1600 a year.
The brouhaha was because they changed their income model to charge people/companies who create their game using the unity engine to make games on a per install basis. Up to 20cents per install of your game ( but only if your revenue was over $200k AND installs was over 200k, raising to $1m AND 1m installs with the unity pro license) .
The changes would take place next January leaving developers with very little time to make any changes to their revenue model. Unity (the company) also changed the terms of use of Unity (the game engine software) so that it was retroactive across all previous versions of unity, ie. If you didn’t like the new terms you couldn’t just carry on using an older version of it.
If you were being charitable you’d call it a clumsy launch or even ill considered. But it went down like a bucket of cold sick with the game dev’ community who viewed it like a greedy shakedown.
The really big bruhaha came from the doing it retrospectivelly (the legality of which is yet to be clarified and likely depends on jurisdiction) which means games made on top of Unity and shipped would also have to start paying this install fee (even though the version of Unity with which the game was devloped and shipped had no such conditions in their Terms Of Service so the game makers never agreed to these new conditions).
Theoretically if found legal this could not just kill certain business models in the game development community and even bankrupt companies (especially for games distributed free and funded by ads).
Now, maybe, hopefully, such retroactive changes to the pricing will be found illegal in the applicable jurisdictions, but in some it might require a quite expensive legal fight to clarify it and meanwhile many gamedev companies working with Unity run a huge business risk if they ship their products with it.
My son watches this show and all the media that’s based on it, there’s alot of bandwagon youtube stuff that people have jumped on just to get those all-important views. I try to understand what my kids are into, so I sat down and actually watched all 60+ episodes of it that were out at the time.
As others have explained, it basically started as a video made with Source Filmmaker that uses assets/characters from Half-life. Alot of it is non-sensical, but there’s some sort of invading force of skibidi toilets (toilets with heads popping out that sing the skibidi song) that are apparently attacking this world. There seems to be regular people there sometimes in earlier episodes, but mostly you see Camera Men (literally just people with videocameras for heads) that are fighting back in some sort of forever war.
As the series progresses, new characters, skibidis, and electronics people are added to the roster, it’s a sort of constant one-upsmanship between the two powers, almost akin to GI Joe or Transformers, but weirder. So you start seeing SpeakerMan, TVMan, and even -Woman, and -Titan versions of all these, but then the Skibidis too come up with new weapons or variants in the war.
And that’s the basic gist of it, though the lore just keeps getting built up over time and keeps getting progressively weirder. My son gets obsessed with it and the music is annoying as hell, I hadn’t heard the skibidi song before, but it’s apparently a remix of something. The electronics people also play a Tears for Fear song (“Everybody wants to rule the world”).
It’s basically old-school gmod animation (I think it might have been done in source filmmaker, but a lot of SFM animators got started with gmod) that somehow got popular with gen-z/gen alpha. Gmod used to be a very common tool for people to make 3d animations with (especially animations revolving around Valve games) because it had access to all of Valve’s models and was extremely moddable. They were almost like 21st-century claymation.
Anyway, gmod and SFM animations have always been surreal and nonsensical. I imagine part of the reason it blew up is because of toilet humor and because it graduated from a dumb toilet-humor animation and into a surreal Kaiju battling series.
If you’re not into vinesauce he’s an older variety streamer from the pre twitch days. Lot of his stuff is finding obscure and terrible games. Halflife amd its mods being a favorite of his.
This video is him explaining what it is, from an outsiders perspective. He goes through a some of the garbage explotive stuff that’s comming from it but also has his friend AgentRedJackel interview some fans of it via vrChat.
I found it was a good summary of everything you need to know without actually getting into it.
I don’t know a lot of details it but it’s basically an animated series about skibidi toilets fighting the “cameramen”. It’s become extremely popular with generation alpha and younger children in general which is probably why it’s so nonsensical.
That’s really it. They’re just fucking weird, and dumb SFM shorts that, for whatever reason, took off. Source Filmmaker and GMOD videos have always been on the surreal and weird side, and this is just the latest line of new hit weirdshit soup.
I think this post started it. It’s a quote from “Werner”, an old german cartoon movie. The german word for sturgeon is Stör. But “stören” means to be annoying or disturbing. A lot of sturgeons got posted to c/ich_iel and it got really annoying. Because of that, Stör-memes are not allowed on ich_iel from tomorrow. Mission accomplished I guess.
Edit: Actually, this post started it. It’s a wordplay on the word Erster (first), but written Erstör.
And before that someone complained in a feedback thread that there were no sturgeon memes on !ich_iel. On r/ich_iel, fish memes have a somewhat longer tradition which I think started with someone noticing a fish called “Huso”. Since “Huso” can also be used as an abbreviation of “Hurensohn” and that is of course r/ich_iel’s favorite word, it was exploited quite a bit, giving rise to other fish memes.
Which, you know, would probably be enough information to someone who spoke German, but then again if someone spoke German, they probably wouldn’t be asking this question to begin with.
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