Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.

For Google it's just another day in the office.

As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium's developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google's whimsy.

Pragmatically it doesn't matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.

The real wild thing is by and large a lot of policies the Democrats champion for have wildly popular uptakes across the entire political spectrum in the US but the Democrats themselves lack the overwhelming public support to implement them.

Florida passed a $15 minimum wage ballot measure and yet as a state votes almost wholly for Republicans.

Net neutrality has broad national support. Democrats never have sufficient legislative power to enshrine that. Repeat ad nausuem with all sorts of popular policies like inflation-tied minimum wage, secured abortion access, healthcare for all, legalize marijuana, etc.

These policies are popular. Half of Congress is represented (in loose terms) by a broad coalition of people who haven't lost it but can't really pass anything people really want because they lack the majorities needed to do so unopposed from both across the aisle and within their own ranks, and the other half have completely lost the plot.

From my PoV it's probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.

Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).

Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it's not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn't ideal.

If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

This comment isn't to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.

Yep lemmy.world is live (stress) testing in production. It has its benefits, like when a set of patches were committed to vastly improve performance that was a big problem on a huge instance like lemmy.world but not on the smaller ones, and its downsides with all the random issues that pop up which happen when testing live in production.

Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit's end. I don't even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn't readily and transparently available from Reddit's developer tools.

Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.

Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.

As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit's new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).

At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.

BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the "client" here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.

I wonder if he feels people have ripped off his hard work? There are direct clones of his app.

In the software world this is to be expected once one puts out something that has any significant reach. "Copycatting" is aplenty, either for malicious reasons or merely as a tribute. Getting hung up on it is a great way to barrel down a endless pit of whack-a-mole. It's ok to express a bit of disdain for it in some regards, but at the end of the day trying to intervene aggressively only leads to more pain and grief IMO.

A lot of people are taking what was learned in putting together Apollo's UI/UX and adjusting them into new tools and applications for a new environment. It's part and parcel of software in general. In the next few years we might look back and wonder why we even considered an Apollo for Lemmy to begin with given the trajectory of current development. And there is much to be said about continued longevity given the preference for open source paradigms of currently popular Lemmy apps.

Time will tell, I think, even if many of us around here are all eager to put Lemmy and this entire ecosystem into a time dilation bubble so multiple years of development can happen in a single day.

Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it's resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I'm so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.

From my PoV:

1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it's very easy to consume content
2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there's a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it's a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That's understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

One of the great things about lemmy.world's insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there's now real world production systems providing that opportunity.

The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.

I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.