Instances aren’t even the biggest pain point for new users (though it’s certainly a big one as much as people insist that it’s easy for anyone to grasp).

The fact that by signing up to mastodon you don’t even get access to all content (every instance has their own block list and federated content) is a massive sticking point. The decentralized nature of mastodon means that you can’t have one uniform experience across the user base, and that’s a huge hindrance to new adoption because people see social media as central squares where everyone is seeing the same thing, but that can’t happen on mastodon by design.

Also, and I’ll die on this hill: the majority of people do not want chronological feeds that they curate themselves. They like recommendations and automatically curated home feeds with the hot new content tailored for them. Any product that only has chronological feeds is DoA when it comes to mass adoption.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the fact you lose everything if your instance goes down (I’ve been through it twice, not fun). This is not actually the case with blue sky, funnily enough, since AT Proto was built specifically to detach your identity from the platform/instance you’re on and carry all your content anywhere.

Insisting that mastodon is easy to use for anyone is delusional. Mastodon, by virtue of being federated, requires you to be a much more conscious user than average. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and some people are happy about having this “normie filter”. I also think that anyone can learn to use mastodon if properly taught, but regardless, it is a massive wall for adoption.

It’s not that people aren’t seriously looking for an alternative (bluesky’s increasing popularity proves this), it’s that mastodon is too antithetical to what people want and expect from a modern social media platform. You can argue if it’s good or bad that mastodon is not following the trends of popular social media, but whether you like it or not, not following said trends is what makes it massively unpopular.

At the end of the day, people just want Twitter without the nazis.

Unfortunately I’m inclined to believe this is on purpose to filter out people with self-respect such as yourself.

It’s not just a cost-saving thing (though I’m sure that’s also a factor), it’s a way to make sure the only people who go through with such interviews are those who are very desperate. Because people who are desperate are more willing to subject themselves to poorer work conditions.

Companies will only stop doing this when it actually stops working, which is unlikely given the massive inequality in our world today.

But I don’t need to do any of that either. My phone’s settings have a transfer option for eSIMs and it passes the eSIM data to another phone.

No need to interact with the carrier app, no need to interact with the internet, no need to login to anything.

I guess activation times could be a thing but mine is always immediately active so I never noticed it.

So that leads me to my previously stated conclusion: eSIM isn’t the issue, carrier implementation is.

I don’t disagree with using physical either btw, I’m just saying in theory they’re the same. In fact your carrier could just as easily lock down your physical SIM.

This sounds like a your carrier problem, not an eSIM problem.

I’ve swapped eSIMs between devices 3 times this year at my own leisure, no involvement from the carriers, no back and forth calls or visiting a store.

From what I can tell reading these comments, people don’t actually have an issue with eSIM (it’s literally just like your regular SIM card and the spec absolutely allows you to move it between devices with zero friction), they have an issue with how some carriers implement them, in particular how some lock down how you can move an eSIM to a new device.

Seems like carrier implementation should be more standardized.

Unfortunately in Portuguese there is still no widely adopted gender neutral pronoun. Heck, as far as I know, we still can’t agree on what the best solution is due to the way gendered pronouns are tied to all the grammar.

But some solutions I’ve seen include:

• Using @ or other symbols in place of a/e. Ele/Ela > El@
• Using U in place of e/a. Ele/Ela > Elu
• Modify the male pronoun (which is the default for mixed gender groups of nouns) to have an accent, kind of in line with the Spanish Elle. Ele > Éle

By contrast, Japanese, which I also speak, has no need to use gendered pronouns (usually you just use the person’s name) so it’s really easy to live by. Even if you need to use a pronoun, there are many ways to make a gender neutral one, eg あの人 (lit. That person).

You’re not the only one, but you are a tiny minority.

Technology Connections did a really good video on this topic specifically, and while you can’t extrapolate his numbers to every channel, seeing that less than 5% of all your views come from people using the subscriptions feed is very telling about how most users operate on platforms like YouTube.

Nobody wants to build their feed anymore. They want an AI/algorithm to do the legwork for them. This is ingrained in modern culture at this point. All the people I know who use any kind of social media site tell me that they just scroll through their home feed and only like stuff or follow creators to improve their home feed recommendations, not to create a dedicated follow feed.

The ones that do, also went mainly touch screen only and cost a fortune.

There are sub 200 dollar DAPs (digital audio player) with physical buttons that run android and thus can run all your streaming services.

Though I’d argue using a DAP for streaming is kinda wasting your money, but if you really want to the function is there at a reasonable price.

You can also use wired headphones with a 3.5mm jack with them.

I just use a flac library I made myself and listen to it with a DAP that cost me less than 100 dollars. Makes the experience much engaging to me personally.

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You can also look at Japan, where railroad isn’t even the main moneymaker for the companies that operate them (pretty sure some even run at a loss). Instead, it’s the hubs that those railroads create (ie all the real state connected to the stations which is owned by the railroad companies and can be rented out to businesses).

In essence, railroads shouldn’t be built because they’re profitable. They should be built because they’re a basic necessity for unifying a country/region. The profit comes from the increased mobility and the new hubs and opportunity that mobility can create. But most politicians are too short-sighted for this.

Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can’t even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.

That’s usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client’s Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe’s constant interference with the program as it’s running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.

As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anecdotal from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn’t run on Linux either.

Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn’t even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.

This is why I just tell people who use Photoshop and Adobe that want to switch to Linux to just accept dual booting. It’s realistically the only thing that won’t constantly lead to headaches with the software.

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The entire video disrespected the Japanese people and the families of the deceased in the efforts for clicks.

This is the understatement of the century.

He and the people he was with literally found a dead person who had committed suicide and filmed it all while giving whacky reactions.

Thousands of online celebrities are assholes, but I only know one person who took a video of a suicide victim and posted it online for the world to see, and that’s Logan Paul.

This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn’t inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.

Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex’s UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn’t interested in viewing but couldn’t remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there’s no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.

I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn’t boot at all.

It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.

The issue is really that Kakao is not just a comic app.

They are basically the Meta/Facebook of South Korea, one of the most valuable companies in the whole country, and they are in quite literally every facet of South Korean life.

They do instant messaging (KakaoTalk), payments (KakaoPay), banking (KakaoBank), public transportation (Kakao T), games (Kakao Games) and probably way more I’m forgetting. If you’re in south Korea you cannot live without Kakao almost.

Webtoons are not a significant portion of their income, but they have so much disposable income and such a drive to go after pirates that they don’t care.

Their actual audience in South Korea is very anti piracy too and support these moves. It’s a very similar case in Japan, but not even the richest Japanese manga publishers are as filthy rich like Kakao, they mostly spend their resources fighting piracy within their borders and leave it at that.

Also the monetization model you’re describing is unfortunately the most profitable currently. They employ it because it works. Webtoons are also by far, and I mean by faaaar, the most consumed comic format. Majority of the public is now reading comics on their phones and Webtoons thrive there. So there’s a very big financial incentive to go after mobile apps because of it.

Unfortunately that’s also the primary reason Kotatsu was targeted and shutdown

Bundling the sources with the app has become very risky because one specific multi-billion dollar Korean company (Kakao) has openly made it their mission to hunt down these apps’ creators and nobody can stop them. They literally brag on Twitter about it and everything.

So the best way to avoid litigation and ensure longevity at the moment is to completely separate the app/reader from the actual sources of content.

But it’s not that inconvenient. Once you add the repository url you can see all the available extensions in-app and download the ones you want. They are also updated automatically so it’s not that involved after the initial setup.

All Mihon forks also have an update checker so you’ll pretty easily keep the main app updated as well.

Mihon or any of its forks:

• Komikku
• Yokai
• TachiyomiAZ
• TachiyomiSY
• TachiyomiJ2K

Note you will need to add the extensions manually but that’s pretty easy to do. This is to avoid DMCA issues like what happened a few months ago with Tachiyomi and now Kotatsu (same company that took down both FYI)

The reality is you and others are afraid of change. There is no windows-only program I can’t run.

Well I’m glad you represent everybody.

People who need to use software like the Adobe suite professionally? They should just abandon their whole career and not use Adobe. Because being unemployed will really show em.

Ah, that’s a shame. Seems like they cut corners, which isn’t uncommon with these things.

Regarding the harem elements, in the source material the girls do gush over him a lot as well, but he does not reciprocate at all, so I just ended up automatically filtering it out because it’s inconsequential, but I do get how some might find their eternal subservience off-putting, especially since with anime it’s harder to brush that aside VS words in a novel.

I just found the series interesting when looking at the broader main plot, which thankfully is the majority of the focus after a certain point. I do also remember the girls being a tad more annoying early on, but once the focus shifts more to politics and all the factions involved, the harem antics get dialed down a lot to make room for it.

The site you’re referring to is almost certainly Syosetsuka ni Narou, a free-to-use Japanese web novel platform, exactly like Wattpad and AO3 as you mentioned. Super common to have a very long title to grab reader attention there, because that’s literally the only pitch you have for new readers on the front page or search pages.

And yes I wanna say almost every modern light novel has its start there. Publishers scour that site for potential new work all the time. It’s not uncommon for you to be following a web novel there and then suddenly get an announcement about how it’s being picked up by a publisher/editor for serialization.

The title sometimes gets slightly changed but usually it remains as is, and that’s how it ends up on anime/manga.

Maybe a hot take, but having read the manga and novels, I would describe this as one of the lesser trashy series of this type. Its geopolitics, world history, and artifact/weapon systems are expanded way, way, waaaay beyond what is normal for trashy fantasy slop.

It also doesn’t even have romance, which is rather uncommon when you have an OP protagonist in a fantasy setting. The protagonist has zero interest in dating anyone despite the endless number of cute women around him who are desperate to pounce on him (it’s got plenty of great male side characters too btw, shout-out to my man Gold).His objectives and his focus remain consistent throughout: plan out his revenge to the most minute detail, expand his political influence to liberate humanity, and discover the truth of the world.

Obviously I’m not saying this is a 10/10 underrated masterpiece, I know this is still a revenge power fantasy at the end of the day, but damn does the lore and the development go above and beyond what you’d expect for something like it.

(spoilers if you want more details)

All this to say that I hope people give it a try. I have not watched the anime because the source material is so far ahead, but if it follows the source even remotely closely, it should be on par in terms of entertainment.