Game journalism is a marketing tool. When pieces come out preemptively defending a product (any product) from some specific criticism, it’s because the company is both confident that those criticisms will be levied, and that they won’t shake out favourably.

That’s it, that’s the whole reasoning.

They know they won’t come out looking in any way comparable in terms of scope, quality, etc, and they’re putting their hands forward through their connections with the press, hoping at least some people will buy this obvious attempt at ass covering and refrain from publicly criticising their product.

Every console they release is so locked down you can’t even install their own os on it, I think you’re wrong.

For my money? It won’t allow that without jailbreaking.

Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.

No, decidedly not. Unless out there there is an instance whose users are all all-around paste eaters, every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation, furthermore political alignment says nothing about insight or competence in fields unrelated to politics.

A nazi is just as likely to know how to fix an obscure bug in some game or program than a tankie or a liberal, people are more complicated than their political allegiances and blanket removing an instance does us a disservice as much as it does them.

Refraining from defederation won’t change that.

Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance is going to make that better, yes.

Not everyone who made an instance on lemmy.ml is a tankie. I almost did, and the only reason I didn’t is that they very gracefully and clearly state that Lemmy.ml is the flagship but not the largest instance.

Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though

Yeah, that’s why I’m suggesting making mods of other instances review ban appeals.

If you ban someone because you’re butthurt your precious red-brown alliance is being besmirched, mods from instances that don’t suck Stalin’s dick on the daily will hopefully call you out on it and force you to reverse the ban or defederate.

My hope is to make it so defederation is not something we do to undesirable instances, but that they do to themselves.

The latter is preferable because it requires an instance to be so ideologically far gone that its own denizens would agree with this over replacing the mod team, whereas the former only really needs a bad enough opinion of the instance from its neighbours, which IMO is not a good standard.

Man, I genuinely don’t know.

I’d expect this to be some sort of public cross-instance structure that is readonly to users so we could spectate the conversations and maybe up/downvote, where you could see what essentially amounts to the meeting minutes in the form of a normal thread?

But before we even get there there’d need to be an agreement and either a fork of the core lemmy code to implement this or we’d need to get the lemmy devs on board and LMAO good luck with that, we’re literally discussing creating a system to divest them of their power and they’re ideologically authoritarian.

I fucking hate tankies, but.

The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.

The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.

I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.

I mean, yeah, and that’s a concern for a slim minority of people, I wouldn’t buy a quest 3 and my quest 1 is seeing very little action since it became clear just how much data is being harvested, but if I had to buy something at this point it wouldn’t be the PSVR2 either.

For one we don’t know if they’ll be harvesting data, or how much, for 2 it’s wired and dependent on a computer.

At that point I’d rather wait for whatever standalone Valve may eventually sell.

Not really, unless you really don’t want to use Meta products (at which point I’d wonder why you would rather patronise Sony of all companies) why would you not get a Quest 3 for the same amount as a psvr+adapter?

The quest 3 is lighter, higher res, can work standalone and doesn’t need a wire to work with a computer. It beats the PSVR2 on pretty much any metric you care to name, except that its screens are not oled hdr.

Shame they stopped using the name “bear country” then ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Yeah, during work breaks or when chilling in the living room with my wife while she does her hobby stuff.

It’s not my main machine by any stretch of the imagination but it does see regular use.

Realistically? The way newspapers were, you have a profit driven business where the client is the reader. Buy the paper, read the articles.

The reality is that that is never gonna happen again; the free alternatives are exactly as shit as the paid ones, so why would I waste my money?

Journalism had devolved into sensationalism made to drive sales to foster ad buys already well before social media and the web made this exponentially worse, at this point, follow the scant few journalists who don’t suck and go from there.

Best thing about this is that everyone will think I’m talking about any amount of pundits depending on their and my political alignment, and that makes it funnier to me.

Please for the love of god yes, anything but Tony running everything all the time.

Meh, I can see that, my dad is the same way, the trick is he hardly uses one and treats it like an OSHA situation when he’s operating it.

TBH it’s not the worst habit to have.

That man has a family

Yeah, hard to have a lot of concurrent players on a 5 hour window

Wasteland 2 and 3 exist

Same, loved the arkham style combat without the plot armor.

You want to do a killer overlong brutal takedown? Cool, cool, you’re gonna have to clear some space and hope nobody decides to whack you with a lead pipe.

Plus the story fit perfectly, and the visuals were on point.

One of the rare times I’m sad to find out there was DLC planned and they didn’t release it.

Not really, the two things are not connected the way you think they are.

If anything, Israel cares about western approval enough to at least put up the appearance of propriety, if that approval were to be lost either way I have no doubt they’d just drop all pretense and purge the contested areas at once.

It’s abundantly clear that we the west are the last people involved in this who care about Palestinian survival (other than Palestinians obviously), their neighbours care only insofar as it keeps Israel busy and weakened internally, but they do nothing to help them (and with reason, since the attempted coup in Jordan), I don’t want to find out what happens when we step aside, do you?

No, it’s a European telling you to stop believing your own hype.

The US is not the center of the universe, your support matters but you alone are not the factor that is going to save or doom Palestine.

Vote based on what’s best for your own country and realise that we neither expect you nor want you to solve everything you deem to be an issue.