Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).
My true faith is: don’t be an asshole and be a decent, rational and empathetic human being.
Everything else I may or may not believe does not matter, it’s decoration.
How many are you?
Fridays for Future mobilized hundreds of thousands to demonstrate for action against climate change.
I can’t imagine they could suppress such demonstrations.
Just genuinely curious - is it like, thousands? Tens of thousands? And why is it not more? And are you saying the media are already so much under control like in Russia or China that any movement can be extinguished before it even can grow ?
It’s just like Russia, only that the official main public TV channel is Fox News, and all the others are too.
Guess which US channel is the only one Russian TV ever cites in their propaganda against the democratic West ?
Exactly. Fox News.
Luckily I was only born in that shithole, my family emigrated 30 years ago, when I was a kid. Still, half of them are brainwashed and watch that crap all day. Kremlin TV. It’s all the same bullshit. Hate, cynicism, making fun of liberal values, playing the victim.
Truth is, USA and Russia are two hateful siblings who usually fought but actually are pretty much the same. Cold war was never truly about systems, it was about who is the top dog. Now they realized they can just work together and divide the cake.
I always hated Europe being so under US influence, but it seemed like the lesser evil because Europe also profited from it, cannot deny that.
But now there’s Russia on the right, and Russia on the left. And China can just relax and wait until the dust settles and collect the pieces.
Hugs from Germany. It must be painful to watch this unfold. Now everybody can see live how it all happened in Germany. And it is still possible that the fascist wave will roll again over Europe too. I hope we don’t, as usual, copy every trend from the US with a few years delay…
Ah good point, totally forgot the early times, I was too young back then I guess. Okay then the impact of Steam is kind of mixed then. From practical experience it is more up to the game developers to enforce or not enforce it and often in practice especially indie games are DRM free or it is easy to circumvent. Steam at least does not install some surveillance rootkit on your system. And I’d claim that it plays about the same role in the indie game ecosystem as Bandcamp plays for music and GitHub plays for open source software, at least that is my impression.
And contra Bandcamp is of course, they recently sold out i.e. got bought by some larger fish with totally different but music legal stuff related business and Bandcamp lost a lot of employees. But at least for now I don’t see drastic enshittification ot Bandcamp yet.
I guess ultimately there is no perfect saint company, they are entities that must generate profit, and only sometimes it really means making customers happy, but more often than not it doesn’t - that’s just capitalism, how it works everywhere.