Preservation is why it’s important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven’t pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I’m not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don’t care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn’t matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I’m sure you have too. I’d love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There’s no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I’ll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn’t mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn’t mean it’s worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.

There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I’m with you on it being inevitable. There’s no way to truly stop it.

Cars are actually a great analogy here but probably not in the way that user intended. The way we use them and the scale at which we use them are inherently unsafe, but seat belts and air bags are an illusion sold to make us believe that we solved the problem as best we can, even though we didn’t.

From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I’ve observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.

They’ve all got server side anti cheat too.

Fortunately, since it’s playable offline, it doesn’t seem to matter how many people will be playing in a month.

They can track you right now without federating. These posts are all public. They can just make an account and farm information.

When I said I don’t have a horse in this race, I meant I don’t much care whether my instances federate with it or not. You’re not the first doomsayer over Threads, but I have yet to see anything that would stop this decentralized thing from allowing us to just de-federate or otherwise ignore any changes Threads makes to ActivityPub after the fact. We literally CAN not use Facebook. You may as well say Microsoft is trying to extinguish Linux, but I don’t think they could if they tried. Yes, I’m familiar with EEE, but the things these technologies are used for appear to make them inextinguishable.

I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol?

Then you don’t use their version.

As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?

Yes? We’re already using not-their-version, without the 100M users. If it’s okay now, it’ll be okay when we decide they took it too far and can go fuck themselves.

Anyway, I don’t have a horse in this race. I have a Mastodon and Kbin account, and I don’t know if either of them plan on federating with Threads or not. It just seems like a lot of alarm over nothing. Saying that people aren’t going to want to defederate from Threads once they’re federated is the same argument people would use to say I wouldn’t leave Twitter or Reddit, and I easily left both of those.

Isn’t ActivityPub an open source protocol?

How do you buy ActivityPub?

Well, you can stick to instances that federate with Threads even if/when they misbehave then, but having the option not to is pretty great, from my perspective.

I’m a Linux user. That “fragmentation” is probably a good reason for why that hasn’t been extinguished either. So as far as I can tell, yes, I’ll enjoy the resilience that that implies without fear of it being extinguished.

I always saw that as a feature, not a bug. The feature that prevents it from being the last E.

And we’re free to move to another instance that has the access, or lack thereof, that we want.

That’s not really an issue though; or at least, I’m not yet convinced it’s one. We’re here because we don’t want to have compatibility with Reddit, and I’m on Mastodon because I don’t want to have compatibility with Twitter.

But then if other instances don’t want those features, isn’t the worst that can happen that instances just de-federate from Threads? I know the history of EEE, but I don’t see how that can even work here.

It’s been not even two months. Modders are going to have different priorities and incentives than a company will, not the least of which is a QA pipeline.