• 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2024

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  • Without a doubt, Patents and Software are a bad mix.

    But there’s definitely a truth to the idea that Palworld in particular were aiming for a legal battle against Nintendo from the beginning with provocative action. There’s a reason why Nintendo has rarely gone after Pokemon-likes but have decided that this particular company is worth pursuing.

    This is kind of a lose-lose situation. Palworld was clearly kit-bashing existing Pokemon models and were engaging in creative bankruptcy, but software/game patents serve only to hurt creatives and developers around the world and Japan in particular is poor around SLAP suits.

    So, I agree, grab the popcorn. But I hope that whatever patents they’re choosing to enforce here don’t have a major ripple in game development as a whole. There’s a world with the brazen IP theft of palworld actually does us all a disservice by making it an easier case for Nintendo to enforce Patents that would otherwise be unenforceable or difficult purely out of optics.






  • I do agree that developers should use their own software, but doing so on a smaller instance with strict active user limits is probably the right call – at least until you are certain the software has a “stable” version, but even then you probably will want to run a master branch instance that is much less stable and prone to errors. Until you can afford it, it’s probably not a good idea for developers to be spending a huge amount of time debugging in-progress features (which IIRC, firefish had a lot of those.)



  • I was on firefish’s previous instance, known as calckey, before I migrated back to Mastodon.

    There were definitely warning signs that the project was facing maintenance issues in those days as well, and it felt that the Firefish rebrand was an attempt to “start a new”.

    But just like my post on KBin’s demise, it should be a warning to those who want to make the software and host a “big” instance: Don’t do it. I think it’s smart to host your own mini instance for testing, but you should probably solely focus on the code development side of things to make sure that you aren’t over burdening yourself with managerial tasks. If your software is good, people will make spins inevitably. If people use it, then you will probably have enough people contributing that you can scale up your mini-instance if needed. But don’t jump in without the finances in place, because you’re essentially taking on two jobs.



  • Is China tailoring the content to politics or are political influencers just better at pandering…

    It’s hard to say without proof so I won’t pretend to know the answer. What I do know is that, if the roles were reversed, China would 100% believe that any movement that caused chaos within the country was somehow orchestrated by the United States as that’s what they’ve done in the past. So, until we have a hospitable relationship where the countries see eye to eye on any social issues, it really doesn’t make sense for either control to have the keys to a popular social media network in the other – if you get my drift. I will also say that promotional programs of games and movies from China, like the recent Wukong controversy, highlights that China very much believes in pushing their political narrative to the degree that it would be hard to imagine them not using it with a widely popular social media network like Tik Tok.

    This is where federation is smart though – the content is dispersed enough that the idea of removing a server is less daunting and there are fewer entities that are too big to fail.