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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn’t, SMS was fine because that’s how I was going to talk to them anyway.

    The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn’t work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

    They own and run a pretty large business. There’s no way that they’re staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they “should” do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

    Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.





  • I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn’t have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.

    You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It’s because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don’t have to deal as much with the things that aren’t building games.

    In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let’s thank our fucking stars that the company that “won” is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.

    If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there’s nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.

    But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.







  • Have a global setting for not sharing the post title by default when I want to directly share an image from the app. It’s come unstuck and turned back on for me a couple times.

    I also wanted to say the only reason I’m using lemmy at all is because of your app; I’m a big fan. As soon as your app turned off for Reddit, I quit using Reddit. I’m glad that you turned to this community, and I’ll support you here too :)

    Side note: I’m a software developer, so if you ever want an enhancement in an open-source library, maybe reach out and I can take a crack at it. I’m mostly familiar with Python and C# but I’m always willing to learn new things!