Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically “piracy” but it’s amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

I think that’s because of Chinese people’s travelling habits. Popular domestic travel destinations include Hainan for a tropical experience, Sichuan for pandas, Beijing for landmarks, Hong Kong for fake Britain, Macau for gambling, and Taiwan because it seems foreign enough without being actually too foreign (to Chinese people).

Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan require travel permits to enter, despite the Chinese government considering them “domestic”. They kinda straddle the line between actual domestic and international. Regardless, it’s not common for Chinese people to have phone plans that work in Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan, so they’ll buy the disposable SIM cards I talked about earlier. That’s why phones typically have two SIM slots.

Getting visas to travel internationally is a pain for Chinese people because they have to visit a consulate or embassy, apply, and then be subject to high scrutiny. After all, it seems everyone’s scared of Chinese spies nowadays. It’s also very expensive by Chinese standards compared to applying for a cheap HK/MO/TW travel permit. The People’s Republic of China passport is pretty weak compared to European or American passports. Chinese people can get visa-on-arrival or visa-free access in South Asian countries, Central Asia, or Africa, but these destinations are not popular with Chinese tourists.

This isn’t exclusively an American thing. I went to China and it’s extremely common to see SIM cards being hawked on the street and sold to tourists. They’re disposable and quite convenient. You buy them on the street, pop the SIM card in, get an activation text, and then you get data for a week before it stops working and you throw it away. They come with different data amounts and durations. But eSIMs do exist as well there, although it’s not nearly as convenient. You need to register your identity (surveillance purposes) and sign up for a regular phone contract. I haven’t seen any disposable eSIM plans there yet.

I think the balance between “sovereign communities”, benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.

Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):

• What I described before as “federated collectives”. New communities can join a collective by asking the others. Maybe there will be a user-weighted vote on this or some other governance mechanism, or maybe it will be consensus-based. Communities can be kicked out of collectives by the same mechanisms or leave on their own. The collective can decide whether mutual mod actions are allowed or not.
• “Colonial-style” relationships. One “empire” community has powers over other “colony” communities. The empire’s mods can (maybe) perform mod actions on colony communities but not vice versa. Colonies can declare independence or the empire can kick them out. Colonies can join only by asking the empire to accept them.
• “Roman Republic collectives”: Mods (or active users?) of communities elect a board of prefects for the collective. Prefects (maybe) get mod powers on all communities. The prefects can vote to accept new communities or kick others out. Maybe they can get other management powers too. The “benevolent dictatorship” case is just a special case of Roman Republic where the number of prefects is 1

Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.

Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.

Real answer: Religion in the United States is protected by Amendment I of their constitution. There isn’t much the Government can do without infringing on or appearing to infringe on this protection.

The Windows Store limits the number of machines that you can install paid software on to 10. If you are managing a lot of computers you’d be better off with some actual management software or at least a package manager like Chocolatey. Then you can push software to your machines, run updates, or uninstall stuff whenever you like.

This is like the people who repackage and rebrand LibreOffice and then resell it for $10 on the Windows Store to gullible users.

And the worst part about that is that it doesn’t even break the law.

It’s not, but what distros frequently top the list of “user-friendly” distros?

Ubuntu, PopOS, Fedora, and friends.

Maybe it’s not how it should be, but that’s currently how it is.

I think it is unreasonable because a Windows user (i.e. myself) can quickly get up to speed with MacOS within five minutes without the need for external instruction. I can manage a MacOS system perfectly fine even without any prior knowledge of how it works. I can figure out how to configure the settings to do what I need it to do without needing to search for how to do it online.

GNOME took almost a week to get used to and remember where things are located, such as what is located in Settings, how the task flow works, and so forth. I never got used to the “disappearing dock”. I had to use an extension for that. GNOME is just way more different than the others. Meanwhile, my grandpa picked up Cinnamon as a lifelong Windows user within five minutes.

I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.

This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.

The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.

We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.

Two types of people in this post:

• Those answering “Why are you on Lemmy and not doing something productive”, and
• those answering “Why are you on Lemmy and not Reddit”

You’re technically supposed to use a human cashier lane if you have a lot of groceries. At least in the USA, it’s pretty common for self-checkout lanes to have “15 items or fewer” signs.

This should just be something that mobile clients can turn off by default.

Active sorts by the number of recent comments. Hot uses an algorithm to sort post based on their age and score (which is upvotes minus downvotes as you would expect).

This wasn’t in the question, but some people might also want to know the difference between “all”, “local”, and your subscribed communities. Subscribed communities has an obvious meaning. “All” means “all posts in any community across all Lemmy instances”. “Local” means “all posts in any community on your instance only”.

The equivalent to Reddit’s r/all is c/all. I recommend sorting by Hot because sorting by Active tends to give stale posts that people are just happening to hold conversations in somewhere deep in the comments.

Spying on your competitors is as old as commerce itself

I think Lemmy needs to take a page from Reddit’s book and automatically link communities with something like “c/asklemmy”