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That's a click-baity headline that doesn't really match the content of the article. Microsoft isn't going to be replacing desktop Windows installations with cloud installations, and nowhere in the article does it suggest it is. Many, many businesses require Windows installed on the desktop (and no, many of those can't switch to Linux, because the software they use is usually Windows-only). The article doesn't dig into who is currently using Windows 365 to stream the OS, but I would assume it's companies that are running computer kiosks, point-of-sale systems, or systems that would otherwise be extremely locked-down (like bank teller systems). Businesses that need system flexibility and resource-intensive applications aren't going to be using a cloud-based OS. Pretty-much any business that does engineering or creative work falls into that bucket.

My interpretation of the article is that they want to extend cloud-based Windows to other users that have extremely lightweight requirements. The biggest market I see is the education market, where you generally want to provide students with very locked down functionality. The article mentions competition with Chromebooks, which is also huge in the education space. I could see this as a competitor to an iPad/tablet too, for those who mostly do browsing, email, or lightweight web-based MS Office tasks and want to have a keyboard and mouse.

TL;DR: People are wildly misinterpreting this article, and there isn't going to be any kind of mass exodus to Linux because of Microsoft investing in Windows 365. Microsoft isn't going to stop selling installable copies of Windows.

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

Many people don't quite grasp the concept of the fediverse or different instances, and just landed somewhere after following an article or guide talking about Reddit replacements. We shouldn't be surprised that such people interact with their instance like it was a monolithic Reddit alternative.

There's evidence in the modlogs that the Lemmy developers (who are also the admins of lemmy.ml) have been banning users and removing posts from lemmy.ml with a reason of 'orientalism' or 'racism' when those users say anything mildly critical of China.
So it's a bit more than just refusing to suppress anti-American content on their instance.

Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.

I think it's useful as a protest because it makes things more annoying for the "average" user. Those of us who've already migrated to kbin or lemmy are the ones who were always more likely to go somewhere else. Having obvious, visible, and sustained protests on Reddit (especially in large subs like r/pics) makes it so the average "I just want to use Reddit" user will at least notice something is up, and possibly annoy them enough to go seek out alternatives. And it also causes journalists to write news articles about it in mainstream publications, so even people who aren't on Reddit are finding out about it. Sure, it might drive up ad revenue in the short term, but I think it will have the longer-term effect of getting more people interested in moving off of Reddit.

You seem to be missing two rather important points.

First, users have no obligation whatsoever to ensure Reddit is profitable. That is not our job. We're the customers (we also arguably create all the value of the service, but let's set that aside since nobody's expecting to get paid for commenting on threads on Reddit). If Reddit needs to find a way to be profitable, then it's up to them to do it in such a way that doesn't damage their business. They have full control over all of this, and have consistently made the wrong decision every step of the way. Reddit management could easily have done what most other companies do in situations like these and backpedaled, given some kind of pseudo-apology, and found a way to do what they want to do in a less objectionable manner. They didn't. If Reddit goes the way of MySpace, it'll be the fault of the /u/spez and the others running the business.

Secondly, the company was founded in 2005. That's almost 20 years ago. If they haven't found a way to be profitable in that amount of time then they're not going to. They have a fundamental business problem they need to fix, and they're in a tough spot because most solutions to that problem will end up damaging the business they're trying to save. Sucks to be them, but they really should have thought of that over a decade ago.

I think it's because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.

What you're proposing is pretty antithetical to the way the fediverse works. Kbin and Lemmy are two completely different pieces of software that just happen to communicate with each other. There can easily be more (and probably will be in the future) that name their version of a subreddit something else entirely. Heck, Reddit could conceivably add activitypub federation and then you'd literally have subreddits as part of the fediverse.

The entire point is that things are decentralized so the users and developers that make use of the fediverse can do whatever they want with it and so that no single person, organization, or community can enforce their decisions on everyone else.

I think it's basically the same idea as Citrix. They're targeting the same market, anyway, as far as I understand. I assume they each have their own pros and cons.

I think the Lemmy instances that disable downvotes are also the instances that have more heavy-handed policies and moderation. They're essentially centralizing moderation to the admins and mods rather than relying on community self-policing through downvotes.

I daily-drive both Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code in my day job, doing C++ and JavaScript/React development. In general, I find Visual Studio more useful for C++ (especially when debugging) and VS Code more useful for web-based technology like JavaScript. VS is much heavier, and to use it properly you really need to have your solution/projects set up properly. There's a lot of complexity to the IDE, which is great when you need it but not when you don't.

VS Code is much lighter-weight and is better if you just want to open a folder as a workspace and do your debugging using something like Chrome dev-tools. I also find search functionality a bit more straightforward in VS Code than VS. The down-side of VS, specifically when talking about compiled languages like C++ and C#, is it's not set up to build a project out-of-the-box. You have to configure that yourself. That's not really an issue for something like JavaScript. Another down-side is that you might need to search for an extension to get some functionality you want (such as various language support extensions, or stuff like GitLens), and using a lot of extensions will slow down VS Code.

To sum up, VS 2022 is great for stuff like C++ or C#, where you need the complexity. But VS Code is better for stuff like JavaScript where you don't.

And even if an average user gets things installed and running, they're going to run into graphical issues and lack of polish that pretty much every Linux DE and application has. Stuff like dialog boxes opening up that are too big to fit on a smaller-resolution screen; inconsistent use of widgets, fonts, and icons; help strings being misspelled or completely missing; applications that look wildly different from each other just because they use different GUI frameworks; etc.

Linux "just works" in the loosest sense possible, and I say this as someone who has been using Linux for many years. It's certainly much better than it used to be in the early 2000s, but it continues to lack the design polish and cohesion of Windows and macOS, and that makes it rather off-putting for an average person to use.

@MxM111 From what I've read, kbin magazine mods can specify hashtags for their magazines and then micro-blog content (like from Mastodon) that uses those hash-tags will show up in the Microblog for that magazine. Or people can manually create a new post in the Microblog section of a magazine. I don't think there's any other way for content from Mastodon (or any of the other fediverse microblogs) to show up in kbin. And Lemmy doesn't have that feature at all, so people seeing this from Lemmy are probably confused by the entire topic.

With all due respect to Jimmy Wales, his social media efforts have not done well at all. WT.social bombed pretty quickly after it launched in 2019, and a quick look at Trust Cafe shows it woefully behind kbin and lemmy in basic functionality. I don't have high hopes for this one.

Kind of. If there's content from an instance that was on kbin.social before that instance was defederated then you'll be able to see that content. Any content that was posted to an instance after it is defederated will not show up. If you want to see that content then you'll have to go to the instance where it's hosted, or another instance that still federates with it.

Use the search field in the Magazine tab on kbin if you want to find magazines/communities. You'll find plenty of Lemmy communities with that.

Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.

Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.

52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we'd really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.

Yep, you're absolutely right. I think my main point is that switching to only offering a cloud-streamed OS as their only offering would kill off a massive market where they have market dominance (enterprise desktops). It doesn't make business sense for them to leave that market. If the demands of that market change, then you're right -- they're going to do whatever is most profitable. But we're nowhere near there yet.

Perhaps I've just read too many Microsoft business documents (I used to work for them years ago), but that's not how I interpret that slide. It looks more to me like they want to "cloud-ify" functionality that could be used either from a desktop install or from a cloud streamed version. The key phrase in that slide to me is "Use the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people's digital experience".

That kind of fits with what they've been doing by moving Windows login to use a Microsoft Account by default (which I hate, btw -- I'm one of those local account people), as well as integration of OneDrive as default file save location. It's the same kind of thing Apple's been doing with macOS for the past few years, adding iCloud integration with everything. If you move that functionality for desktop installs to mostly be cloud-based, it also allows you to create a more viable cloud-only offering. But it doesn't mean there's a reason to stop selling a desktop-installable version.

Microsoft is still a business, and they'd lose a ton of market-share by killing off desktop installs, especially in the enterprise sector, which is their bread and butter. They're looking to expand into other markets, not kill off large existing ones.

If you want to have absolute control over what other instances you federate with, then yes. Even then, though, other instances could still potentially defederate from your instance.

Yes, I realize that, which is why I added the parenthetical about users providing Reddit's value. The fact remains that in the business/customer dynamic, we're on the customer side. We're not neutral bystanders, and we're sure as hell not part of the business side.

I can only assume that the people having trouble understanding kbin/lemmy are either relatively young, or relatively inexperienced with technology. Basically those people whose online experience really only started in the era of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Those of us who were online in the early 2000s are familiar with web forums. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically just web forums that can be interacted with from any kbin or Lemmy instance that's federated. Those of us who are even older and were online in the 90s (or earlier) are familiar with Usenet. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically Usenet newsgroups, with the particular instance you're on essentially the same as your Usenet provider. Or for the really old folks like me, instances are like BBSes that are connected to each other with FidoNet.

It reminds me of people who get confused getting on Discord for the first time, when it's really just a modern incarnation of chat-rooms or IRC. None of these ideas are new, and people were able to figure out these core concepts decades ago.

I don't think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.

You also don't seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don't like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive. I told you the reason you're seeing much more US-centric posts. You have quite a lot of options if you don't want to see that stuff, but telling everyone else not to post it is not one of those options.

Welcome to how the Internet work? The thing you don't seem to be realizing is that this isn't an 'American obsession' thing. It's a population thing. kbin.social is advertised as an English discussion forum/link aggregator. It just so happens that the largest English-speaking country on the planet is the US, and by a lot too. The next-biggest is the UK, which has a population 1/5th the size of the US. Canada is even smaller, at about 1/10th the population of the US. Even if people post things at the same rate, you're going to get 5 US-related posts for every UK post, and 10 US-related posts for every Canadian one. There are simply more Americans online. This kind of thing is going to happen on any widespread English-language discussion forum on the Internet, and has been this way since Usenet in the 1980s.

I don't think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it's the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.

The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn't be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the "main" one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.

ASCII pictures of John Oliver?
Alternatively, only allow discussions about how to set up or use kbin/lemmy/other fediverse software from the command line?

The 4060 isn't out yet and hasn't had independent benchmarks reported on yet, so I'm not sure how you can say how it compares to the 7600. Unless you meant the 4060 Ti? But that card costs $200 more than a 7600, so it's not really comparable.

It'll have to be tested, but I'm not sure Perspectives will do what the 'reddit' query does for many people. I can only speak for myself, but I typically would add 'reddit' to searches because I was looking for thorough information on a subject, and I was certain there would be some random subreddit out there full of experts and enthusiasts on that specific niche topic. I don't want social media or influencer content, I want content from people with extremely deep knowledge about very specific things.

Both the Lemmy and kBin UI show the domain of the link in a post. I would assume if someone got a post to the top of hot/active/whatever and edited the URL, then the UI would be updated to show the new URL's domain.

I don't know anything about the mobile apps for the fediverse, but you can definitely search for communities from the Lemmy web UI (same goes if you're on kbin). If you go to the Communities tab there should be a search field in the upper-right.

It’s the first change to the Office default font in more than 15 years.

Man, I remember the change to Calibri, and now I feel really old.

You're applying the political science definition of 'federation' and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.

Not exactly. Think of other instances as just other forums that all connect to each other (which is what federation is). Lemmy is essentially just different forum software, but it still federates with kbin. If you want to find the subs/magazines/communities/whatever-we're-calling-them mentioned above in kbin, go to the Magazines tab at the top and search for their names, or just change the URL to kbin.social/m/<community-name-without-the-!>, such as https://kbin.social/m/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world for mildlyinfuriating. As long as the subs are federated, you can subscribe and interact with them from kbin even if they exist on a lemmy instance (and vice versa).

Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an "everything app" on WeChat's success in China, which basically does what he's talking about. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn't popular in the west at all.