I’m not disagreeing with you there.

Heavy rail is for transport between municpalities and everybody has a bus system at least in Europe.

Well London for example has a lot of suburban heavy rail, it’s not on this list of course because of the tube, but conventional rail fills in a lot of gaps that the tube doesn’t cover and actually works well. You could sort of say the same for Leeds/Bradford, though probably not as good, it’s in an area with a dense rail network which probably explains why light rail never took off there - I’m not from the area so I can’t really say how well it works. I’m a big advocate for trams and light rail but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for all cities, cities with different geography, density, etc need different transport. That’s why I said about quality in my other post, the overall quality of a city’s public transport network should be judged, not just the modes of transport.

I was actually thinking more about how it doesn’t include any continental European cities without them. I think I agree with the premise that we could benefit from more of them here in the UK, while we have some we probably do lag behind most of Europe, but presenting it like this it’s not even making that point. Also there’s nothing that takes in to account the quality of the network, a good bus network, or heavy rail, or both, may be preferable for some cities but would fail here.

Not saying the UK/Ireland couldn’t benefit from more tram systems but how were the cities picked? Because it seems like you could cherry pick them to say anything. Also strange it ignores heavy rail and doesn’t seem to like buses.

I think you’re probably right, though I feel like there’s something nagging me in the back of my mind that I’d seen that somewhere in software pre-Windows 95 but I can’t think of it. They were using it a lot in the 90s definitely.

For me eggs are a better improver of foods than a base for a meal. I.e. I’ll rarely crave “eggs” in general, but I could be planning a meal of something else and then think “oh, an egg will be nice with that”.

More clumsy to use than a mouse/keyboard setup, smaller screen, fewer options when it comes to adblocking/privacy (or options in general).

The point is instances don’t have to federate with them if they’re causing problems for their members but from what I’ve seen I’d say they’re relatively benign, it’s not like they’re fascists.

I just want to add to the discussion that I think it’s perfectly healthy if two instances don’t like each other and/or have different outlooks - it’s the beauty of the fediverse and having decentralisation that they don’t have to agree on everything.

It’s an important software choice just like choosing a browser (though unfortunately browser choices are much more limited these days).

I usually see people discussing distros but I feel like picking the right DE makes much bigger impact.

Yes I do feel like the emphasis is often wrong; choosing a distro should be about choosing a philosophy towards included packages and updates, choosing a DE is much more relevant for day-to-day user experience/workflow.

If it works against the user’s intention then I’d say that’s friction of another sort. For example if you go to a website and scroll more than you wanted to due to dark UX (as opposed to good content), the user may not immediately realise it’s a bad experience for them, but still they’ve wasted extra time hence the site has got in the way of what they were originally trying to achieve. It’s become normalised so it’s not always recognised.

On a personal note, I want to be able to go on Lemmy and say “OK, I’ll read the top 2 pages of my subscribed communities” and let that be it, that’s a much more reasonable way of approaching a large amount of content.

It prevents you from keeping track of how much you’ve read and makes the site more addictive with no significant upside, and even without that it’s worse UX when you try to go back and read something from earlier you have no idea where it is. Commercial sites still use it because they care more about keeping users on the platform than overall UX, but there’s no need for software like Lemmy to do it. Yes, dark UX is bad UX, it’s the worst kind in fact.

If it looks like anything of the past then it looks like the web from 10-15 years ago pre-mass-enshittification, maybe people have forgotten what non user hostile websites look like.

Photon has infinite scrolling, which is horrible.

I used Lemmy for months, mostly in the browser and my UX was absolutely horrible.

The default browser UI sucks.

How long ago? It was a bit flaky a couple of years ago but for me now it’s perfect - like Reddit UI before it enshittified.

I don’t like to ever assume negative intent without good evidence. I think I’m taking the neutral rather than optimistic view here. If you want me to speculate whether this new company is good or evil, that would just be my speculation; it would depend how they intend to make money out of it, from my gut instinct I can’t say they give me any specific Google vibes yet.

The freedom to decide what software am I allowed to run on my PC is important for me though

I’m right with you there, and it’s proprietary software that threatens that, nothing included in this announcement does though.

But how it’s implemented means everything. Google’s play integrity is corrupting because it’s designed to lock vendors in to Google’s proprietary ecosystem. You’re not getting that from this ‘language’ alone, it could be the case but it’s a massive leap at this point.

They haven’t announced anything other than a vague outline of what they’re trying to solve, it could be implemented in so many ways at this point.

That was my take, yes.

In what sense?