Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

  • 1 Post
  • 354 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers’ minds, to reverse course. It’s the intended outcome.

    Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.

    Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a “spend money” button that players hit over and over again. That’s the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They’re all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.














  • I like the “antennas” feature a lot

    For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

    From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.


  • Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.

    No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”