Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn’t have an “old Reddit” interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.

That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.

I wonder what’s happening?

In general…

Microsoft is being pushy and has started to enjoy that far too much.

This started with things that could be argued as things that users shouldn’t control (like refusing to patch update… you can’t really refuse anymore).

It then pushed to things that is a little less defensible (you were asked to update from Windows 7 to Windows 10… but they really don’t want you to say no).

Once you are on the newer Windows 10 or 11, features just arrive that you have no say about because Microsoft determined it is better for you (you have AI, now AI on your taskbar, in fact you have an AI key on your taskbar, you will use Microsoft AI… the AI will just sift through your entire computer so that it can jump in front of your face to emphasize that you should use their AI!).

They points all have the same theme. Microsoft knows best, you will do what Microsoft wants, and Microsoft won’t really take no for answer but may let you say “bother me later”… maybe. Once you are really pissed off, your only option is to leave a Microsoft operating system… which Microsoft is pretty sure you can’t figure out on your own (more reasonably, you won’t care to put in the work to learn another way) so Microsoft OS it is! Microsoft is a tad worried that those people are starting to wander off to get Google Chromebooks or just use their Android smartphones… those take less effort and more people are opting for that…

Still, Microsoft is relatively sure that people will just put up with what they are doing. I’m pretty sure they will… until they won’t. Microsoft will be fine so long as they don’t cross the line into the “until they won’t” territory. Once they won’t put up with that nonsense anymore, it is far harder to woo them back to a Microsoft OS in the future.

I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.

There are times that people can’t throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don’t have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of “render those advertisements”.

I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.

Looking around a bit, it seems like you have a myAudi app which you register your VIN to which then lets you access the additional features.

https://www.audiusa.com/us/web/en/about-myaudi/vehicle-functions.html

Problem with that is that it implies that you are the one purchasing the features for that vehicle. If the vehicle is sold as used then you unlink the VIN from your account so that the new buyer can register the VIN to them. Then the new buyer seems to have “nothing” and has to “purchase any of those features permanently” again.

With such a system in place, I could imagine that a proper Audi dealership can be authorized to “continue a permanent subscription” to a new used car buyer (or Audi can just offer those sorts of upcharges at the point of sale).

Regardless, permanent only likely applies to your ownership and not to the vehicle itself.

The quote about what is a hard brake exactly or heavy acceleration is most relevant to my thoughts. Without any context, are you hard braking to avoid dangers? How many hard brakes are acceptable? What is the penalty for hard braking, etc?

What happens if your specific vehicle has a sensor somewhat out of spec that keeps errantly triggering harsh braking? You wouldn’t know the sensor is activating, you wouldn’t know that the information is being fed to your insurance, and you wouldn’t know why your insurance is priced as it is. You have no transparency as to what is going on nor any realistic way of fixing the issue (because the vehicle runs fine after all and nobody can define what “harsh braking” even is).

Such a hypothetical situation is unlikely but even several dozen or hundred examples is a bit too much…

Also, since you are never directly informed that you are harshly braking or accelerating, you are unlikely to improve how you drive to avoid those things. If you had a notification that the braking action was a bit too harsh then you could strive to avoid that in the future… not so much if you are never told that in the first place.

If you don’t know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older “new” interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).

Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?

We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.

Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.

I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.

That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.

Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.

So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.

It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.

>> "We are an AI company now! Hey Bob, do you know AI?"
## "No... ?"
>> "FIRED!  Joe, do you know AI?"
## "I can learn about..."
>> "FIRED! Bill, do you know AI?
## "... yes?"
>> "You can stay. I'm heading to the next floor to ask if they know AI!"