Real tree, usually with 10 strings of lights around the rooms but that has been reducing as we age. There is a smell and ambiance of a real tree that can't be beat, it really sets the winter mood.
They kind of shot themselves in the foot by launching it paid. I saw plenty of launch coverage when you had to pay a subscription and also buy games but everyone knew they would shut down because it was Google so no one bought into it. This is the first I've heard of it being free and I had to confirm it but that would have really sweetened the deal on launch.
I enjoyed 7 when it first released. The visual style in the first 10 minutes was appealing and I figured we were retreading the same notes for nostalgia before going on a different plot with Finn. Nope, just poorly written rehashed story lines with nonsense plot devices. So much potential thrown away.
IMO, yes. HDDs are always going to be a bit noisy, but the consumer grades keep it fairly classy. The couple of HGST drives I got from ServerPartDeals are noisy in the "grating" way. The volume is similar but the noise is not in the normal pleasant range. I am only fine with it because my server is in another room.
Skype basically worked like this back in the day. It had it's ups but for day-to-day users it was rather unintuitive so Microsoft moved to a server system when they took it over. I am pretty sure there are still p2p chat systems around though, I just don't know any of them by name.
This is not a small task so apologies for overstepping that a bit, but MusicBee on Linux. I have been trying out Linux music players and none of them are anywhere even close. Mainly I miss the auto playlists feature and the full support for custom tags, but a lot of features could be replaced with scripts as long as the program allowed easy shortcuts and menu options to send files to those scripts.
I'd actually love to make it myself or contribute to a project to get it there, but I have a feeling many projects don't wish to become that "bloated" or the base wouldn't be much better than simply starting from scratch. But if anyone knows projects that are actively taking commits or are close in feature set...
Supernault is actively considering having the flagship loops.video server function as the centralised service for the For You algorithm.
That sounds... potentially counter to the goals of the Fediverse. If it's its own open-source and hostable project with an easy switch for admins to provide a different algorithm then I can see how it would be a big leg up for better discovery, but if it just locks you into phoning home to loops.video then that is terrible.
I have thought for a while though that search / indexing should be a separate Fediverse service to allow even tiny instances to make use of large-scale search, but only as long as it remains open for anyone to host an indexer.
I would happily bet money that federation keeps getting kicked down the road. "Oh, we have to do X first. Also Y just came up, and you know it was a waning moon last night so...." They have no reason to enable it as long as things go their way.
It's likely not as bad as you think. :) It took a bit of adjusting for me realising I didn't have several endless AskReddit threads a day to scroll through, but for 99% of my usage it's great here. It's also nice being able to interact with posts while not being one of the first commenters. I get more interactions here than Reddit. The only things I go to Reddit for are specific subreddits like dashcam videos, but that's a once a month or perhaps less frequent affair.
I'll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.
Echoing what other people said, finding a server was hard especially as at the time I thought defederating seemed stupid (changed my mind somewhat now that I use Lemmy). Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren't synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
Now into the big problem I had: federation was a pain. It was my first interaction with a federated service that isn't email and it was confusing and annoying. Finally find an account you like? Well you either can't see any of their posts or the few you can have 1 reply and 5 likes. Eventually you realise you have to click onto the account's instance to see everything and they have 100 replies and 500 likes (made-up numbers, obviously) but guess what you can't interact with any of them because you are no longer on your instance. It basically forced me to browse logged out for 99% of my browsing, constantly following links between websites. I have not had quite the same trouble with Lemmy because despite having some similar problems, it has been a LOT quicker to sync especially once you point your instance to another.
The lack of algorithm or fine control of my feed was off-putting. I still hate that Facebook and other platforms make it hard or impossible to sort chronologically, but having only chronological makes for a potential to miss out on massive amounts of stuff.
And on a personal note, I think I'm just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers. If my friends used it things might be different.
I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.
In the imaginary world where Gmail required you to visit Outlook to view the entire thread because it hadn't synced yet, yeah sure they're exactly the same. In the real world the email comparison stops being useful beyond explaining how @ monikers work.
I still see the old one so your comment is appreciated