Maybe that’s what this community wants, which is fine (just not for me).

… Judging from the number of downvotes on this post (and my personal opinion): No, the community doesn’t want it either.

If this user/bot were committed to posting this, but stayed with a single user (which I could block), I’d be fine with that. If they posted weekly, I’d tolerate it.

… but creating new users and spamming multiple channels with content people really don’t want to see: that’s just trolling (or ignorance).

… and that was the last Linux version of Skype.

Homer: "… I’m in flavor country. "

https://youtu.be/H8s93B67mpQ

This is a very cool concept, but has anyone actually gotten this to read as a qr code?

I’ve tried a bunch of apps without any luck.

Not the Fediverse Chick?

…that last step will be a doozy.

I don’t know if you tried it or not, but I’d suggest that you install the latest release from their Download Page, as opposed to other sources.

I’ve noticed on Android, that the F-Droid Version is not “quickly” updated and frequently breaks due to breaking changes from Google.

(I’ve also just upgraded to v4.0 on my android phone and it’s working - good luck!)

Spotube: It’s not the greatest UX, but will read your Spotify Playlists and supports offline mode.

That’s a very clever solution. But it’s really convient to create a login in your phone and immediate switch to your laptop and login.

I’d used KeepassXC + Nextcloud to sync for ~4 years.

Then I switched to Bitwarden client + self-hosted Bitwarden Server/Vaultwarden for ~2 years and I haven’t looked back.

The problem you’ll face with KeepassXC + any syncing mechanism is that conflicts will happen. Meaning, you’ll make a change on your cellphone, your internet has a hiccup or stops working. Then you make a different change on you desktop. When everything is synced, you’ll be left with a KeePass conflict file that you need to fix. This might be fine if you immediately notice it, but if you stumble upon a conflict file from a month ago - good luck merging the differences.

Bitwarden client + Vaultwarden has improved my password experience radically. I have phones, laptops, browsers, etc all talking to Vaultwarden. Any conflicts are handled automagically by the clients. Everything “just works” in offline mode (meaning I can add/update credentials while offline and it’ll update the server whenever it can - without needing to do any mental gymnastics).

I can share passwords with friends and family without needing to share everything. Plus, as my instance is self-hosted, my family can get “emergency access” (would be a “premium feature”) to my passwords if something unfortunate happens to me. Plus, requesting emergency access is pretty easy to do, for non-tech people.

edit: a word

Whatever they’ve been doing the last decade hasn’t been right.

That depends on which side of the wealth gap you’re on, right?

The old guard has to die off or step aside first.

I don’t think “dieing off” or “stepping aside” is going to be the catalyst for change.

What will happen is that the old guards will groom the next generation in the playbook’s they’ve been (successfully) using and refining for the last decade. Those groomed players will then be their successors.

The only way we’ll get the “change and improvement” is if we (as a society) say “this is enough, you’ve gone too far”. However, given the levels of apathy and the recent election outcome, I’d say the American People will need to suffer more, before they’re shaken out of their apathetic stupor.

The thing that unites most of the “racist Nazis” is desperation.

Especially, in the U.S. the erosion of the middle class is forcing families to be either upper or lower class.

The lower class families are struggling and have been struggling for quite sometime. They experience day to day, the struggles of keeping their jobs, keeping food on the table, not to mention trying to fulfill the dream of having a holiday.

These people see “illegal” immigrants working in the fields on their way to their minimum wage job. They hear on the news how “more jobs are being created”, yet they’re still stuck in their dead-end job and they’re the lucky ones. Their friend Pete’s been in between jobs for a few years now. Pete can’t get a job 'cause these immigrants work for pennies on the dollar and Pete’s got a family to feed.

They’re all desperate, they’re cornered. Then they become hateful. They see anyone who is not in the same situation as them is “the enemy”. The people who are stealing a piece of their pie (ie the illegal immigrants) need to be stopped, but they aren’t because corporate greed is funding this.

Then on the news, you hear about a messiah. He promises change, he understands the injustice you face on a daily basis. “The System” that claims “everything is fine and is only getting better” is fuming about the messiah. Your distrust of the System, combined with their knee-jerk reaction, makes you wonder “hmmm… maybe this is the change I need… any change would be better than the stagnation we’re currently facing”.

So, they go and vote for a wannabe dictator.

disclaimer: these are not my opinions, but merely my empathy (I know of these people) . This is also a similar sense of desperation that lead to World War 2.

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

It’s great that you brought up TCP vs UDP. And you are totally right about TCP being a bit slower, higher overhead, but it’s there for situations where UDP is blocked.

I’ve used my VPN at all sorts of hotels, coffeeshops, etc. I’d say 1 in 10 places block UDP (or more likely don’t properly route UDP). If you’re using a SIM card, you won’t have any issues.

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only. There are some hacks/workarounds to have it work over TCP, but then you’re going to need to find WireGuard clients that also supports these hacks (which is possible on computers, but harder on cellphones/tablets).

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

Lemm.ee: It’s the Switzerland of the fediverse. ;)

The Operations Team are a stand-up group. Their focus is on delivering stability.

You’ll basically get access to all content (and all “features”, like up-vote and down-vote - I’m looking at you beehaw).

What I’ve heard from other people is that they want automagic curated content… so you won’t find that a lemm.ee, but for me - I’m happy to find the content that’s meaningful to me.

You will likely want to set up your own instance blocks

As a former Redditor, I gave up on /r/all years before the enshittification (due to the poor signal to noise ratio) and started culling a list of meaningful subreddits. For me this was a game changer.

If you plan on using lemm.ee (or any Lemmy instance) as a pre-curated r/all, I think you’re going to have a bad experience. Lemmy, in it’s current state, wasn’t really made for that (the sorting is too simplistic).

For myself, I simply subscribe to the communities that I’m interested in. If I feel my daily feed is sparse, then I’ll look at what’s threads are trending in the entire fediverse and add those communities, then repeat. After following this process for a couple of weeks, I seldomly want/need to check the entire fediverse.

I appreciate that Lemm.ee will let me choose the communities that I’m interested in, regardless of they happen to exist on Lemmy.world, hexbear, etc.

I’d definitely add a +1 to lemm.ee

The admin is open and honest, he’s got a clear set of goals, which is to make lemmy accessible - nothing more, nothing less.

Lemm.ee doesn’t participate in the whole “federate vs non-federate” drama or crippling features (ie: removing downvotes) because it goes against their ethos/mantra.

There are instances that lemm.ee defederates from, but they are usually due to extreme vore, cp, or other content that could expose lemm.ee to some legal problems.

I had an on site interview with the owner of a small IT company. He was 30 minutes late (and I’d arrived 10 minutes early to be… ya know, punctual).

He offered no apologies and had this whole arrogance surrounding him. Complained that he had to drive to the office for this. Then after 5 minutes, it was obvious he didn’t even bother to look over my CV and was completely unprepared for the interview. … and somehow this was my fault.

Of course, the interview didn’t go well (for either of us). He offered a lowball 30% less than the average salary, I was looking for 30% above. I rolled my eyes, shook hands and left.

Later, I got a call back from the recruiter “I had no idea you were asking that much. From what X (the owner) said, this was a complete disaster.” I said, “I agree” and politely hung up.

In hindsight, I should have probably insisted on rescheduling (or just left) after 20 minutes. But, I was young and didn’t have many interviews under my belt. So, I took it as a learning experience.

I quickly skimmed the title and got:

“What is the first… mind… reading… question?”

answer: “Do these pants make me look fat?”

This is loosely related to “online experience” (as you’ve covered most of the “tech tips”) :

When choosing a movie don’t watch the trailers, instead (blindly) watch what’s popular. (obviously, if you’re into niche genres - this won’t work.)

I’ve found Trackt is a good place to understand recent trends (and it just shows film posters). Then I’ll go to IMDB, maybe read the summary, but I always read the first/popular user review and decide if it’s worth my time and money.

The first/popular user review usually doesn’t contain spoilers.

Since I’ve actively avoided trailers and spoilers, my enjoyment for films has nearly doubled - even for “bad movies” (I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise). It’s such a shame that a 2 minute trailer often shows many/most of the highlights of the film.

I’d proposed a potential solution.

I’ll paraphrase : Currently, every Lemmy instance (ie: Lemm.ee, Lemmy.world, etc) is an island. This is one of the strengths of Lemmy (Federation) as we don’t have to worry about information being restricted, censored, manipulated (ie: Reddit).

However, as things are currently, this Federation comes at the expense of splitting the community between instances. [email protected] vs [email protected] is a perfect example. Posts are either duplicated (which creates noise) or it fosters a “Lemmy instance death by starvation”. Meaning, more and more conversations will eventually drift towards one of the two asklemmy communities, leaving the other one to “starve out”. This defeats the entire purpose of federating.

There has to be something better.

For example, instead of “every instance is an island”. Meaning the current hierarchy is “instance” - > “community” - > “post” - > “threads”. We could instead have “community (ie: asklemmy)” - > “post (ie: this post)” - > “instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)” - > “threads (this comment)”.

From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance (that’s interested in hosting this supercommunity) would replicate the community names and posts (Not the threads).

Lemmy already kind of does this, when a user pulls a post from another instance. For example, I’m on lemm.ee but when I view posts from [email protected], lemm.ee will retrieve and cache it on lemm.ee. As long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as “the same thing” (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UI.

Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.

As an end user, you’d view a community and post, but the comments/threads would be grouped by the instance that hosts it. If there’s an instance you don’t like, you simply unsubscribe from it.

For future iterations, it might be nice if the instance itself would auto-subscribe or suggest other instances that host the same community to the user. Meaning, if I subscribed to [email protected], I’d automatically be subscribed to [email protected]. However, as the user, these are all separate subscriptions, so I can customize it as I see fit.