Some people like to rag onto Canonicals bad decisions. These include:
Yeah, YT is the last holdout for me. It’s literally the only Google service I willingly sign up for. I’ve tried Piped/Invidious, but they don’t match YTs quality.
PIA is owned by Kape Technologies., a dodgy company, founded by a member is Israel’s Intelligence Devision. They’re known to spread malware, steal users data, and redirect traffic to advertisers. That being said, PIA claims that despite being owned by Kape, they remain in control of their day-to-day operations. I haven’t heard of any major issues, since the acquisition. Kape also seems to like the profitability of their (several) VPNs.
Up to you if you trust them with your data. Personally, I do not.
Redistributing the wealth!
The only thing that comes to mind is PeerTube. I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen it suggested a few times in the privacy community.
There’s a couple of ways to block it.
Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.
If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.
If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.
There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.
This isn’t surprising. China is a powerful foreign enemy. We shouldn’t be surprised that they’re spying on us. They have been for decades. Just the same as we (I hope) are spying on them.
Until today I haven’t seen an ad on YT, for years. Then I searched for a video, clicked, and got an ad. Clicked off the video, restarted the browser (also updated uBlock’s filters), and that fixed it.
Edit: I wrote this and got another ad. No video, just the audio.
IGG is a cracking group with a mixed reputation. Early on they distributed malware, which continues to give them a negative reputation. Though, I haven’t heard of anything bad about them, in some time… some repackers also use their cracks, with no issues. I think they were the first that cracked the latest Armoured Core, for example.
Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.
Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“
When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.
Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.
There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.
Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.
Honourable mention to Final Fantasy 7, and Zelda Ocarina of Time. They might have been great when released, but I don’t think they’ve aged well.
I heard about this several years back, and lost all hype when I heard its based on Fallout 4. Now after seeing this… alright, I’m on board. Just… please… let me shoot a certain PM, responsible for Brexit. Give him the Gary treatment, so I can do it over, and over, and over, again… oh god, he’ll be one of the faction leaders, won’t he? The Nat-C (National Conservatives) party will be the radroaches of the game.