Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.

Yep lemmy.world is live (stress) testing in production. It has its benefits, like when a set of patches were committed to vastly improve performance that was a big problem on a huge instance like lemmy.world but not on the smaller ones, and its downsides with all the random issues that pop up which happen when testing live in production.

Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

• Ads
• Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
• Obtrusive Ads
• Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
• Ads masquerading as real submissions
• Paid promotions

Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.

One of the great things about lemmy.world’s insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there’s now real world production systems providing that opportunity.

The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.

I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.