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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Sure, but you’d have to find someone willing to talk about it. In fact you’d probably want to find at least 2-3 people who can all confirm the same story.

    Plus if you can call it a scam right out of the gate (this article is a follow up to the original purchase article when the phone was first “released”) maybe you can limit the damage of the scam.

    If you can spend $100 to rightfully call out a scam that would have made $1,000, is that a net win? That’s an honest question. I think so, but I understand that might not be the case.




  • Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo.

    To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn’t use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.

    One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.

    I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the “True Linux Explorer”, but the wiki outage accelerated it.




  • then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

    As a thought, do you really lose them?

    For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

    It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

    Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

    Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.


  • I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

    I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

    Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

    Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.



  • Search also sucks because people suck.

    If I post a picture of a flower with the caption “Look what grew in my garden!”, that’s a terrible post from a search point of view.

    Later on someone will search for “flower” but I didn’t use the word “flower” so now search sucks.

    Of course a much more common post is someone posting a picture of text, from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. with, once again, a vague caption. You remember the picture, but not what the poster actually said.

    Searching comments will sometimes help, but that depends on the comments being related.


  • I just tried a bunch of apps that I swear used to have it, it all of them just say “Open in the real app” now. I wonder if low usage here also means developers stopped using them.

    Basically what would happen is you’d click a link to Instagram, and instead of opening a web page, it would open the Instagram “app” instantly. If you then tried to do anything more advanced in the app (advanced decided by the developer) it would prompt you to install the app.



  • David F. Sandberg aka “ponysmasher” comes to mind. He started doing largely horror films himself on no/low budgets. One of his own films got opportunity to become a feature film. That then gave him future opportunities, the largest of which was Shazam! (2019).


    Additionally when YouTube Premium (YouTube Red at the time) first launched they also launched YouTube Originals. Many of those programs were created by YouTubers.

    The “Originals” eventually stopped being made, but it’s not clear if the issue was the content, the service or a bit of both.



  • You’re not affected if (and only if)

    You always used the Brave browser or the DuckDuckGo search engine on mobile

    I found that odd, but reading the more technical write up (linked in the article) it seems Brave blocks localhost communication.

    The Chrome proposal references a single use case. I’ve never seen a website that sets up my local devices, but is this a new thing?

    Why did localhost not get blocked earlier? This seems like a huge hole browsers have ignored for years.


    Also the DuckDuckGo exception doesn’t make sense to me. Does DuckDuckGo have Facebook trackers on it to begin with? Whatever site DuckDuckGo sends you to, if they have the trackers, you’ll get tracked.



  • Linux has two ways of drawing pictures, the old way (Xorg) and the new way (Wayland).

    The old way is like a giant box of crayons with the crayon sharpener built in. The box is all marked up, the sharpener is full of gunk, and a few crayons are melted together. Nobody really wants to touch the old box of crayons, although it does work for the most part, it’s a familiar box.

    The new way is like a smaller box of crayons. The clean sharpener isn’t built in but it is available nearby, although some people say it doesn’t work as good. A few crayons are missing, but are available in most cases, they’re just not in the box. Most people are working to improve the new box.

    If you’re using Linux, the new box of crayons is generally the better choice. It’s ok to stop using the old box.