5 euros a month. Worth it, it’s by far the best VPN.

I’m glad I skipped release day. Definitely waiting to buy it on sale after it’s been fixed with updates and DLC. Sucks to see companies treat buyers like testers.

A real transition will happen in bursts. I’d love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there’s no budge.

Colossal Order is the dev, Paradox is just the publisher. Paradox deserves crap for their many mistakes, but this one isn’t theirs.

I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.

And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.

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For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.

Paradox is just the publisher on this one, Colossal Order is the dev.

That’s true, an instance would be very tempted by that. I was referring more to the day to day, there’s no incentive to squeeze users.

Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They’re not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.

I think some people do this. However, I’m 30, live with my long term partner, and have a bigger friend group than I’ve ever had before, with weekly events. My partner isn’t a stand-in for socialization.

I’ll fully admit I have some advantages because I have no kids, and a job that pays decently and isn’t too demanding. I’ve met people through:

• dating apps. This is how I met my partner and also a very good platonic friend

• activist/interest groups. Got involved with a local urbanism group, now I know many of the people there

• house parties. I got lucky here, I met someone that throws monthly house parties, went to those regularly, and made some very good friends that way

• reconnecting with childhood friends. Again, lucky, but a few of my HS and college friends live in the same city as me and we reconnected and hang out.

The one bit of concrete wisdom I think I have here is that if you go to the same social place regularly you’ll see the same people and if you put yourself out there you’ll get to know some of those people. Activist groups or meetup groups are great because you probably already have some things in common.

What do you use now?

I mean google’s whims as in they’re making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I’d rather these problems were solved collectively.

I think it’s a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I’m not sure how things would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP’s failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.

To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.

They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.