It’s just premusk twitter at this point.

I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the “not Twitter Twitter” after musk bought the main one, I don’t think it’s surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being “even-handed”

Oh my bad. According to another commenter it is sandboxed though

This is one of the reasons my main email is a (unique) password I still memorize, so if my password manager fails catastrophically I can still get in.

They have Google services but through a third party wrapper called MicroG, which keeps it sandboxed to a degree that you can keep it from doing system-level actions like this

edit: not microG, as evidenced by the strikethrough I put in very soon after receiving the first of several replies clarifying the situation. I would encourage you to read one of them before adding your own. <3

That doesn’t fix the out-of-the-box experience of the platform for millions, if not billions of people. Yes it’s a good step to take individually, but insufficient to deal with the broader issue raised of latent alt-right propagandizing

Desktop OSes, my bad.

iOS is still much worse than Android in terms of “walled garden” practices but Google has been slowly inching over that way, what with the recent crackdown on sideloading apps.

While the main quote I can find is like 6 years old at this point, Tim Sweeney directly compared Linux to a US citizen moving to Canada when they don’t like the political landscape. I’m sure his opinions have become more nuanced since then, but it’s still imo just needlessly antagonistic.

In that regard I think both Epic and Valve are trying to advance the industry in different ways: Steam trying to break PC gaming from Windows, and the EGS trying to free up restrictive mobile app store policies. We really should be able to directly buy and play mobile games from whatever storefront we choose, not being limited to Google Play or the App Store.

Since Valve and Epic are both for-profit companies, the advancements are largely for profit’s sake of course. I agree that we should take wins where we can secure them, but always be vigilant for how a company might turn the tables once they have the upper hand and try to mitigate that. We’ve seen the same anti-consumer practices happen many times over in the PC hardware market, such as with AMD v Intel or AMD v Nvidia, where a given company pushes for an open standard only when they are the underdog.

I wouldn’t dislike Tim Sweeney so much if he didn’t write off Linux so much.

He’s diehard on primarily having the Epic Games Store support Windows, which is ironically the most monopolistic and anti-consumer OS right now.

(minor edit to acknowledge Windows isn’t the only platform since the EGS is also available on Mac)

Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.

I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.

A “privacy” company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it’s done with pure intentions.