Are you certain it’s actually safe? There was a recent attack in which multiple Steam publisher accounts were hijacked to spread malware.

Yeah but the main issue is that I don’t want there to be a Downloads directory in my home.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.

This is a joke: Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it.

Article: the above is not a joke

“Backwards compatibility” is a totally different thing from “cross compatibility”. Of course proprietary software is going to be less cross-compatible.

When SETI decides to stop blasting your videos into deep space.

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.

Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:

1. Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
2. Click “create account”…

SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.

3. 95% of users will bail at this point.
4. Scroll down to the instance search UX.
5. Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
6. Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
7. Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
8. Confirm email, log in. Click search.

Search or paste URL

9. Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xin wtf?
10. Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
11. Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
12. Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.