Capitalism is a system built on greed as a foundation to function. In a capitalist system, you must always continue to grow, expand, engulf, absorb, and acquire. This is why it is such a toxic and destructive system. Capitalism will always incentivize companies to get the most people possible to spend as much as possible on as little as possible, that's literally the core principle of maximizing profitability.

It's why enshittification keeps happening, the system isn't broken, it's working exactly how it's supposed to.

Capitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.

Worth it 100% for me, I love mine. I didn't think I would use it much, I honestly bought it initially to just support the project and help FOSS friendly hardware and software.

But once I started playing on it, I fell in love. I play lots of indie games and smaller studio games, like Brotato, Hollow Knight, Battle for Wesnoth, Core Keeper. I also installed RetroArch and play all of my favorite Game Boy games. I play Old School Runescape with my friend, some kart racing games, some fighting games.

I also have Jellyfin installed on there, so I use it docked to my TV as a box for streaming from my Jellyfin server to my TV for movie nights. Discord runs pretty well on it in the background, so it works well for group party games like Pummel Party with my friends. Also games like Table Top simulator to play DnD, and virtual board games.

Idk, it's just a perfect device for me. Super moddable, repair friendly, FOSS friendly, powerful enough to play most games without issue, works with every kind of Bluetooth device I've tested it with, controllers, headphones, etc. And now that it's been out for well over a year, all of the most severe and annoying bugs have been fixed, so the general experience is very smooth and stable.

Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, "if you're not growing, you're dying." There's a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.

And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.

Bitwarden. I've used a bunch of password managers, Bitwarden has been by far the best for me.

The mobile, desktop, and web app are all awesome and work great.

Self-hostable, open source, great feature set. Pricing is super reasonable for their cloud hosted features. Ui is simple, clean, makes sense, and so far I've had zero issues with syncing, saving, etc.

IMO, it's a great example of a FOSS application that looks and functions as good or better than the nicest closed source proprietary software.

GrapheneOS, other custom OSes, ability to hack/mod/repair.

Apple is one of the most scummy and anti-consumer companies in the world, they won't ever get a dollar from me or any endorsement.

At the top levels, they are rich and well-connected enough that they don't have to worry about failing like regular people.

They can burn millions, billions of dollars and still get out with a fat paycheck, a pat on the back, and another CEO/exec job lined up by one of their many wealthy friends. Either that, or they are "forced" into retirement where they live large for their remaining lives.

I wish somebody would force me into a wealthy retirement...

Not sure, but I hope hundreds of thousands come in. Realistically, I doubt it will be that many, and idk if the instances could handle that kind of load even if it did happen.

But we can hope all the above!

Echoing many things that other users are saying already:

Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don't think it's very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click "subscribe."

Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it's not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.

Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that's worth a ton right there.

I don't mourn Reddit, but I am sad that the it's another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.

Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.

Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos as long as I can.

Long live the free and open internet!

(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)

I would love for the federated model to become a gold standard for how successful platforms ought to be run.