Not trying to be defeatist, but I feel pretty confident that this stuff will be forcibly or "accidentally" removed soon before the canvas stops being editable, or it will just be edited after the fact. The admins have the power to simply wipe away anything on the canvas that they don't like.
I have not ever bought a single game that used those monetization strategies as a part of its core business model, and I never plan to. The problem is that people like me (and presumably you) aren't the ones they're making the bulk of their money off of. It's the vulnerable people with addictive tendencies, the "whales" as they call them in the industry, that they're getting the vast majority of their profits from. It's predatory.
When they're targeting people who are struggling with addiction, "voting with your wallet" doesn't work anymore.
I would agree if it was about genuine game mechanics or story or things like that. But lootboxes aren't designed for fun. They're designed to exploit vulnerable people for maximum profit, and trick others into giving those vulnerable people an incentive to spend away their life savings on thinly-veiled gambling for virtual prizes.
We have much to gain from lootboxes (at least in their current state) being removed from the equation entirely.
Because you can make sure it was done right. You don't have to worry about bugs or other issues being the result of faulty packaging if you're the one doing the packaging. Plus It makes reproducing bugs easier when everyone's using the same package, and declaring the flatpak as the official package makes it much more likely that people will use the flatpak.
Only a little. The only thing I'm really worried about is IBM (maybe secretly) forcing Red Hat to reduce or cut its involvement with Fedora to save money. Without Red Hat's help, Fedora might struggle, but I don't think it will die or be corrupted as a result of whatever's going on.
Also, while I don't have the full picture, I heard that the whole "closed source" thing was an exaggeration in the first place. So maybe there isn't really much to worry about. We'll just have to see of course. I like Fedora a lot, but I can just switch if I need to, so I'm not really letting this worry me.
I second the recommendation. I know a lot of people don't like the browser (although I find that a lot of that dislike comes somewhat misleading rumors or stories) but the search engine really doesn't have anything to do with the browser except that it's by the same company. I often switch between it and Duck Duck Go, and I don't use Brave browser.
There's many different reasons (all of them ignorant or blatantly made in bad faith) but one that I recall off the top of my head is that, since Linux gives users more freedom and more control over their operating system and computer, playing on Linux makes it easier for you to cheat in games. They like that in Windows, there's parts of the system that Microsoft simply doesn't allow users to touch, because in some cases, they still can, so they can use that to implement things like rootkits sorry I mean "kernel-level anti-cheat" that users have no effective way of removing or bypassing.
To me, it really doesn't feel like you need to switch unless you're actually being affected by this in some way. Fedora isn't actually Red Hat, they're just sponsored by them and assisted by them in other ways because Red Hat uses them as an upstream, but the worst case scenario that I know of, is simply that Red Hat will cut ties with Fedora.
I use Flatpaks and they're pretty great specifically for gui applications that don't need any kind of deep integration with the system. For terminal applications or for applications that do need system integration, they're not quite ready yet.
I've never tried snaps, but I hear almost exclusively bad things about them, so I'm not really interested in trying them either.
He said brave search. It has an independent index, so that's a pretty notable difference from something like Duckduckgo which IIRC uses Bing under the hood. The googles features is also a really cool idea! I just wish there was a way to make private googles for just yourself.
This and that other post that linked to a post from Snoosite makes me think that having a /r/LearnJapanese equivalent here would be cool. I would make it myself, but I already have my learning method pretty thoroughly figured out, so I wouldn't really have many ideas for posts to contribute.
As far as your instance is concerned, no one can downvote, even outside of your instance, because downvotes are rejected by your instance. This means that downvotes from other instances aren't visible to any users of your instance or any other instance that has downvotes disabled, and they don't affect the sorting of posts.
In my experience, downvotes do little but encourage dog-piling and echo chambers. I have a few accounts on instances that disabled downvotes, and few that enabled them. The difference is very clear. The instances that disabled them have noticeably more rich and diverse discussion, with users being less afraid to disagree with each other and have proper debates.
The instances that have them enabled vary a bit, but I noticed a pattern that certainly reminds me of The Hard R: Most comments on a popular and highly upvoted post are basically people agreeing with the post over and over again with different words, and then there a few comments that actually disagree, but you'll have a hard time seeing them because they were downvoted into oblivion. This isn't always the case, certainly not as much as the other place (at least not yet) but I have already noticed it happen.
And if they're disagreeing in a respectable or kind way, then that's good! It encourages discussion and debate, instead of simply clicking downvote and leaving the poster no way to know why you disagree at all.
If they're being rude or inflammatory, then that's breaking the rules anyway, so instead of being downvoted, it should be reported.
Not trying to be defeatist, but I feel pretty confident that this stuff will be forcibly or "accidentally" removed soon before the canvas stops being editable, or it will just be edited after the fact. The admins have the power to simply wipe away anything on the canvas that they don't like.