No doubt in my mind M$ employs obfuscated layers of (contracted) marketing to astroturf, including downvotes of your cautionary comments. The line between a fanboy and astroturfer is blurred.

Gaining subscribers/customers while bleeding money, then charging more money once your competitors are forced out of the market or investors want to cash out, is a basic strategy… I doubt Game Pass was ever profitable, it was all an illusion propped up by accounting tricks and obfuscated/discounted internal operating costs (where M$ can shift xbox costs to money-printing cloud services division).

No doubt after years of failed xbox, that Phil Spencer is just a corporate suit executing the vision of M$ as a whole (in which Games is just an inconvenient detail). Expect more of the same, bundling of other services, no actual good in-house games. Activision acquisition in part of this strategy to pump up Game Pass, since M$ internal studios have not produced anything noteworthy this generation. I expect the next xbox to have cheaper hardware to undercut ps6, but to have increased game pass incentives to make up for it. maybe a random bundle with netflix. you gotta think outside of the (x)box for whats coming next.

Doesn’t scratch the same itch yet. I have to cheat and go check out reddit every now and then.

I couldn’t even get pass the login screen since I only lurked and never made an account (despite spending over a decade browsing reddit). I remember they used to let you use the app without logging in.

be on kbin instead.

sneak in more reddit for niche subs.

set up an rss reader again.

find more discord communities.

turn off my phone earlier at night.

Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.

It’s cool we all want the new community to succeed and get live updates on things being fixed or worked on. There’s some shared misery in growing pains/bugs as we all stress test the system, but I think that only somehow brings more communal joy when the problems are fixed.