Friendica says “hello”.

the childlike whimsy that Misskey has.

This, so much. I really wish I could read Japanese, because the really active Misskey instances look genuinely fun to be on. It reminds me a lot of the OMGPOP days, which I miss dearly.

On Mbin, it shows as just a regular upvote. Emoji votes would also be a great change, too! I like the way Misskey-like instances use them.

I think votes should honestly be a bit more like old school SlashDot voting, where you had several different types of votes you could leave on a comment like Insightful, Funny, Helpful, etc. Have a few negative ones like Bad Faith Argument, Spam, Advertisement, etc. And also like old school /., you’d have a limited amount of votes you can give. Make them replenish once per day, or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments, or something along those lines.

That would prevent bombing an entire comment thread with downvotes, and provides much-needed context for any given comment’s score.

Well that just gave me a new fear.

Oh, that makes sense, thanks!

What does that mean?

Someone tell the creator of Girls Gone Wild.

I don’t think Joe Francis is going to be the good guy in this scenario.

anyone could read the code and understand how it works

“Anyone” is doing some heavy lifting here.

I hope he’s doing well. Thanks to the code he started, I’m on the Fediverse in the first place.

Okay.

You may notice that OP never provided a link to the instance. It’s not an advertisement, it’s a warning.

There was some Michael Jackson rhythm game for the DS that would, when it detected it was a pirated copy, replace all the normal midi instruments with vuvuzelas.

Arkham Asylum would disable Batman’s glider ability, making pirates plummet to their deaths unexpectedly. Somebody reported this “bug” on the developer’s forums, and a dev replied back “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code” before explaining that it was an intentional anti-piracy hook.

One of the ARMA games (2 or 3, I think) would start playing bugles at random intervals and would make your guns’ accuracy slowly get worse over time.

Some developers are pretty damn clever at it lmao

There was no special chip on the cartridge either, not sure where you heard that from.

Hmm, I may be conflating or misremembering some details, possibly involving the Earthbound Zero prototype cartridges that were floating around for a while. It’s been a long time, but I do distinctly remember that very early in SNES emulation on PC, that there was a bit of a struggle getting Earthbound (Mother 3) to pass the piracy checks, though every emulator for the last ~20 years handles it just fine now.

It may have been a different Nintendo console that did a voltage check. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t just make that up out of nowhere. Now it’s gonna drive me crazy figuring out what I’m trying to remember. :(

Earthbound is notoriously difficult to emulate accurately, because the cartridge had a unique chip on it used to detect if the code was running on an authentic cart, for piracy detection. The game will run a check on this chip to read its voltage; if it’s not at the correct reading or if it returns a null value, the game would know it was running on a bootleg cartridge.

What it did then was kinda sinister. It didn’t stop you from playing the game. But it GREATLY increased the spawn rate of enemies, making the game significantly harder. Then, if you managed to make it through the antipiracy hard mode and get all the way to the final boss, the game would intentionally crash itself as soon as the battle begins, and it deleted your save file. You couldn’t finish the game. It let you get 99.99% of the way there, uphill, and then says “get bent” and wipes all your progress.

So does this mean it’s in a state where people can start hosting their own instances and begin federating yet?

I thought CalcKey renamed themselves to Firefish, and then development on the whole project stopped? I know that Sharkey is a popular fork that still seems to be in development.

You can, it’s just not the most streamlined process. If you’re federated and you can find your instance’s copy of the thread, you can generally reply to Mastodon comments just fine.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s not just an Mbin thing. I’m almost positive Lemmy can do it, too.

Music and analytics are huge news. Those, alone, bring Loops much closer to being a viable platform for users who take content creation/reach seriously.

"All means all.

Not always. For instance if you have NSFW filtered, in which case “all” means “most”.