I miss forums as well, and I’m actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000’s, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just ‘doing the rounds’ kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.

Places like a niche subreddit are… OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don’t tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who ‘found a watch and wanted to know what it’s worth’. or ‘is this fake’. The subreddit didn’t curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.

Some consider that ‘gatekeeping’, but I see it as a valid way of protecting one’s chosen community.

I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?

One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.

I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.

But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.

The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.

I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.

These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.

I’ve never had a Droid, but loved every other Motorola that I’ve owned. Including the original StarTac and Razr. They made some really nice phones over the years.

Well, while those flexible screen flip phones certainly look like neat tech, it’s not the same as the flip phones we used to have.

And it’ll need a few more versions before I’m comfortable buying one. Those screens tend to be just a bit too fragile.

Jesus, that’s a blast from the past for sure!

It really was the thing everyone latched on to with the N-Gage. I actually still own a first gen model that I bought on release. It was actually pretty decent, both as a phone and the games it played. Of course, it never really took off, but I enjoyed using it.

As for the sidetalking… I bought a headset for it to avoid that :D

For me, it’s just the fact that phones… are phones. They all look the same, function the same, there’s just nothing new happening with them.

Sure, chips get better and faster, they’ll add another camera to it and fiddle with the dimensions a bit, but that’s not innovation. All phones look like boring rectangular slabs.

Back in the late 90’s, phones had way more variety and personality. Candybar, flip, even the sidetalkin’ taco that was the Nokia N-Gage. A Motorola Razr looked nothing like say, a Nokia or Sony Ericsson. And those were distinctly different from your Samsung or Mitsubishi phones (Yes, Mitsubishi made phones!).

I’d love it if we went back to more phone variety, but I fear the smartphone has effectively killed every other style. Most people wouldn’t ditch their big screen smartphone to go back to a small flip phone.

That’s my local university; I listen to it all the time. It’s awesome to just listen to things from god knows where, knowing that it bounced around basically half the globe to reach me.

The tech itself is also really cool. You can have hundreds of people all listening and tuning to their own frequencies, all at the same time.

Well yeah, if your group self-identifies as FOSS nerds, that’s about what I’d expect :D I bet a lot of them are also into Linux, right?

I love my Linux/FOSS brethren, but most people just buy an iPhone or some Samsung and are perfectly happy just using those as is.

It really can depend on where you are. For example, in the US Google had a 4 percent marketshare in 2023. It actually doubled compared to 2022: that was 2 percent.

Buf if you happen to run with a group pf people who go against the grain and buy Pixels, it might very well feel like a dominant brand.

In our company for example, everyone has iPhones. So to me, they appear to have 100 percent marketshare, when reality is closer to 50-60 percent in most markets.

Australia does have some quirks, as many Australians like to point out :D

According to marketshare figures, last year Google had 3 percent marketshare in Australia. IPhone was 43.8 percent, followed by Samsung with 31.8, followed by Oppo (4.5) Lenovo (3.6), HDM (3) and finally: there’s Google with 3 percent.

https://appleworld.today/apples-iphone-now-has-46-5-of-the-australian-smartphone-market/amp/

In the US, iPhone and Samsung have bigger shares and Google is at about 4 percent (was 2 in 2022)

So at least from the statistics, Google isn’t doing particularly well in Australia either. But you certainly might run with a particular group of people who prefer them over other brands. People do like to conform to a group.

It’s certainly more than a bit annoying that THIS is the product that Google keeps alive, while constantly killing other, much more useful products.

I’ve literally never met anyone with a Google Pixel. It’s just not on anyone’s radar when buying a new phone. I’m sure some like it, but it’s not exactly setting the world on fire.

Honestly, it’s not surprising. They seem very ban-happy there lately, with accounts getting banned over nothing. And I’ve seen a fair few subs getting the axe as well. When a site gets actively hostile to users and lets mods run their own little dictatorships, people eventually get fed up with it.

Lemmy isn’t Reddit, but at least it’s… also not Reddit :D

It’s going to take some getting used to. As someone with a visual disability, I generally absolutely hate when developers mess with UI’s and color choices. This isn’t TOO bad, though I would still prefer darker rather than lighter tints.