Two problems here.
One is jurisdiction. If the website is not incorporated in Florida, has no offices in Florida, and does not use Florida servers, why should they be subject to Florida law? Everything they do is completely legal in their home jurisdiction.
This sort of enforcement is basically impossible on the internet. If anybody can access any website from anywhere, how is the website supposed to keep up with hundreds or thousands of changing jurisdictions each with their own legal requirements? And why should they have to?

Second is interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. It reserves to the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. I would think that demanding that a out of state business change its business practices would fall afoul of that.

Now it could be argued that since the website advertises in Florida and accepts sign ups from Florida residents, that they do business in Florida. However the simple solution there would be to disable payment for Florida residents.

When you buy a game, doesn’t matter the platform, you pay for it with a credit card. The credit card companies are holding the game platform hostage, saying either they start censoring what games they sell or they lose the ability to process any credit cards for any games at all.
That is essentially holding a gun to their heads, if they can’t process credit cards they can’t bring in any money and they might as well just close shop and go home because their business is finished.
You can boycott steam or itch or whatever else, but they all use the same credit card processing systems- Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc. if they start applying these policies to all game retailers, it will simply become impossible to buy any vaguely pornographic game. Period. Anywhere.

Thus, boycotting steam or itch is counterproductive. They are victims just as much as the consumers. They have no desire to ban these games, they were happily selling these games a week ago. But when they are being told ‘ban a bunch of low volume games or you cease to exist as a company’ that is what they do.

Thus, this phone call campaign. It is focusing on the credit card companies, the ones who are actually applying this pressure to game companies.

It is telling them we do not want them dictating what people are and are not allowed to spend money on. We do not want them to enforce morality. And if they got the impression we did, it’s because a small minority made a couple of phone calls.

The idea is if 1,000 people call in and complain about the porn game, and 100,000 people call in and complain about the censorship, hopefully they will get the message.

Mass storage is a block level protocol, phone can’t also use the storage while mounted via mass storage. This required a dedicated storage volume on the phone that could be locked to apps while connected by USB.

MTP (media transfer protocol) is a file level protocol, like a shared folder, that doesn’t lock the storage for exclusive use. Phones use this now.

That was the case on the old Motorola StarTac. One battery was attached to the top of the flip, and then there was a larger battery that could be clipped onto the back. Both would power the phone so as long as one had power you could swap the other.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

It’s part of a worrying trend which seems like Google is trying to hyperconsolidate Android. Apps can already check if a device is running genuine original firmware, which means a lot of banking apps don’t play well with third party firmware is like grapheneos. It should be none of the apps fucking business what OS I am running. But by giving developers the ability to check this stuff, they can wash their hands of it and complain they aren’t forcing anybody to run anything it’s those darn app developers.

Honestly the more I think about this the more I think that you are not only right, but putting all of our proverbial eggs in one basket with smartphones was a horrible horrible mistake. We have done too many trade-offs for convenience.

Try to buy a digital camera today, pocket digital cameras basically aren’t made anymore. And even a mid-range pocket digital camera from the mid 2010s significantly outperforms a modern smartphone camera. It’s simple physics, bigger lens captures more light gives you a better picture.

Try to listen to music. Almost all the digital music we are served up is lossy compressed for streaming. And then we feed it into Bluetooth headphones with even more lossy compression. The sound that actually goes in the ears sounds like crap and bears little resemblance to what the artist laid down on their master, but we’re all used to it so we think that’s what music is supposed to sound like. A late 1990s Discman has significantly better sound quality even with a cheap DAC.

Try to do something online. A whole lot of new sites and services don’t even bother making a website, it’s just a promo to download their stupid privacy invading app. And if you want to do whatever you are doing on a real computer with a big screen, you’re SOL.

And then there is the unintended effect on our kids. I have always been an advocate of mobile technology. But I am looking at the actual effect of growing up with smartphones and tablets, and the result is an awful lot of kids with attention spans measured in seconds rather than minutes. Kids who can edit video and insert images into a document with their eyes closed, but can barely write three coherent sentences.

I have always been an advocate and user and enthusiast of smartphones and mobile technology. I buy this stuff, I use it, I recommend it to others.
But I think maybe I was wrong. I think maybe we all were wrong.
I look at the overall effect smartphones have on society, and I honestly can’t say the world is a better place as a result. We take crappy pictures, listen to crappy music, have crappy attention spans, but it’s all very convenient so we don’t care.

I think maybe we were better off the other way. And maybe some of that inconvenience is a good thing, in the same way that having to do physical work is good exercise.

But that’s what I’m saying. I don’t want us to be reddit. I want us to be better.

I would agree to this but with one caveat Let’s try to be better than Reddit. These days, Reddit and to some degree let me also has become a circle jerk of closed minds (on all sides of any issue). When confronted with a position they disagree with, people are far too quick to write the person off as a racist, statist, Nazi, anarchist, commie, etc. Rather than considering the merit of the person statement. Let’s be better than that. Let’s all be better than that.

Having a closed mind is easy. It’s lazy. It gets you to that hit of dopamine faster, you tell someone off and hit post and you feel like you’ve done good. But most of the time you haven’t. You’ve done nothing to persuade them of your viewpoint, or enhance the discussion for others.

That’s not to say nobody’s wrong. There’s plenty of people who are wrong about every issue. But tell them why they’re wrong. Have a little good faith, assume that just maybe the person on the other end of the thread has good intentions, also wants the world to succeed and society to be great, they just think their view will help make that happen better. So rather than calling them an idiot, tell them why you’re right and your ideas are better. Engage with them.

That’s how Reddit used to be. Not recently, I’m talking way back in the early days before the digg migration. It was a place for intelligent people to have reasoned discussions. Let’s make lemmy more like that.

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

Of course it’s their choice. But I also think some people in some situations should recognize a broader responsibility. Because we get into a larger question of, what happens when the public square is privately owned?

With a website like joinfediverse, that domain becomes a primary resource for people looking to get into decentralized platforms. By not including something, the maintainer is not just making the choice for himself but for every new user who visits the site. That responsibility should be taken seriously and the choice not just made based on personal opinion.

Think of it this way, imagine I made a site called whoshouldIvotefor.com and it would ask you questions and then recommend a political candidate. Sounds like a good idea, right? Now what if I make it so the site always recommends a Republican candidate, and only justifies why the answers you gave to the questions indicate that vote? I’m certainly allowed to do that. Free speech and all. But it could be argued that I also have a responsibility to the voters who come to my site who don’t realize it is biased, in that I am pushing my personal opinions on them and causing them to make a decision that they wouldn’t have made if they had all the facts.

(Disclaimer- I’m not a Republican, I consider myself liberal-libertarian. I’m using that as an example.)

I am just saying that a site which sets itself up as an authoritative on ramp to the fediverse should try to be unbiased and not based on personal opinions of its editor.

Well, since you’ve vocally criticised the developers and they haven’t bothered changing their ways, wouldn’t you agree they deserve to be gatekept?

No. In fact, I strongly dislike that whole attitude of ‘do what I want or else I will cancel you’. I am not the arbiter of what is ultimately right and wrong and neither are you and neither is parent commenter.

I believe people have the right to make their own choice. And since Lemmy has significant user base and significant active discussion and thousands of communities, I think the users have the right to make that choice for themselves. Make them aware of the situation, make them aware of the potential downsides, make them aware that lemmy.ml is run by tankie assholes, maybe recommend some better instances, and let them choose for themselves.

That is why I like Lemmy and the fediverse as a concept. I can choose the instance that has the policies that I want. Among those policies is which other instances to defiederate from.

I agree 100% with this. The developers or the operators of lemmy.ml may be assholes, but the beauty of decentralization is I can simply not use their instance. I do not. Thus, while a warning label is necessary, I think more good is done by making people aware of the alternative to Reddit than by sweeping the whole thing under the rug.

As for user privacy, I’m not sure Lemmy is any worse than any other Fediverse app. There were a couple of bad things like being unable to delete a hosted image, but that has been fixed. Once again, warning label, not rug sweep.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.

I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?

Quantity isn’t everything

That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.

Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.