Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.

For Google it's just another day in the office.

As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium's developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google's whimsy.

Pragmatically it doesn't matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.

The real wild thing is by and large a lot of policies the Democrats champion for have wildly popular uptakes across the entire political spectrum in the US but the Democrats themselves lack the overwhelming public support to implement them.

Florida passed a $15 minimum wage ballot measure and yet as a state votes almost wholly for Republicans.

Net neutrality has broad national support. Democrats never have sufficient legislative power to enshrine that. Repeat ad nausuem with all sorts of popular policies like inflation-tied minimum wage, secured abortion access, healthcare for all, legalize marijuana, etc.

These policies are popular. Half of Congress is represented (in loose terms) by a broad coalition of people who haven't lost it but can't really pass anything people really want because they lack the majorities needed to do so unopposed from both across the aisle and within their own ranks, and the other half have completely lost the plot.

From my PoV it's probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.

Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).

Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it's not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn't ideal.

If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

This comment isn't to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.

Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit's end. I don't even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn't readily and transparently available from Reddit's developer tools.

Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.

Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.

As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit's new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).

At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.

BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the "client" here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.

The bot is probably the same bot used on /r/manga to automatically post chapters from Mangaplus and similar services. This is usually a burst of activity during the weekends and a few submissions over the week.

It's just a quiet place when no one really wants to comment on anything really.

Given it's basically a direct port of the bot I don't particularly care. Really the "problem" is the real content of communities like these are the discussions but there's been absolutely no concerted interest or activity to drive people to visit and participate. Taking out bot updates for some series won't change this.

From my PoV:

1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it's very easy to consume content
2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there's a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it's a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That's understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

Yep since the first party app's primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it's packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

• Ads
• Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
• Obtrusive Ads
• Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
• Ads masquerading as real submissions
• Paid promotions

Third party apps don't have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.

The content porting really only means something when it's not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.

The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it's just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.

Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn't do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.

Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.

Due to the nature of Federation, don't hesitate to make accounts on different instances as needed to access that instance's content. I reckon a number of people have accounts on Beehaw and accounts elsewhere.