I’m currently using SailfishOS as my daily driver due to the lack of apps on Ubuntu Touch. I have Ubuntu Touch on my PinePhone though. It certainly has its advantages over SailfishOS such as better app isolation and I really like the idea of convergence.
I’m considering to port one of my Saiflish applications to Ubuntu Touch as well (a Jellyfin client), if I ever find the time for it. :)
I like ElementaryOS as well, but there is one big downside in my opinion that makes it less user friendly and that is that it does not officially support upgrading between major versions (e.g. 5.1 to 6.0). You have to either mess with repositories on the terminal and hope for the best or you have to do a complete reinstall. So if you install Elementary OS, make sure to create a separate /home partition so you can perform a major upgrade without loosing too much data.
Otherwise, I believe that Elementary OS is quite nice. Although I had to help them at first by pointing out where the application menu is and to help them install LibreOffice (they were already used to it on Windows and it apparently did not show up in the App Centre), they mostly seem to be able to use it themselves with the same amount of assistance required as while using WIndows.
I’ve seen Reddit devolve since 2014. Look at /r/all and it almost resembles a Facebook feed.
There are several annoyances that made me switch:
- More and more people posting low-effort, stupid short jokes that tend to gather lots of upvotes instead of giving an actual answer
- The upvote system likely causes subreddits to only have one view. If your opinion doesn’t align with that view, it will be downvoted and hidden. Opinions that align with that view will float to the top.
- The stupid new awards system with coins and all that kind of rubbish. When it just was Reddit Gold, it was fine in my opinion. It was simple, it helped out Reddit, you could buy it for yourself or gift it to someone else and most importantly, it wasn’t hidden behind a virtual currency to make the real cost of awards ambiguous and easier to spend.
- The enormous focus on growth by making Reddit accessible to people who were thrown off by the old design. I feel like the big influx of new people by this changed the Reddit culture instead of those new people adapting to the Reddit culture that was there.
- People writing “I have a question” as their post title. Just state your question in your post title.
- People posting a link to an image and then writing the actual post as a comment. Please just make a self-post and link your image in there if it is necessary.
- Subreddits starting to require email verification on your account (looking at you, /r/linux).
Combined, these made me search for alternatives. The thing that I liked the most about Lemmy is that it is federated, so that became my main alternative. But I’m afraid that if it gets too big, that it will get the same problem regarding upvotes as Reddit has.
I tried Raddle.me as well for some time, but I lost interest at one point. I don’t know why anymore, perhaps to few users? When I look at the frontpage now, the content on the website doesn’t really appeal to me. It seems too extreme to my tastes.
The side-effects of upvotes (or likes, by extension) are a though problem to solve, I think. You can do without them them, like some image boards. But on some of those, like 4chan, you’ll get people who post not for the upvotes, but for the amount of replies they can get. This simply ends into many flamebaits being posted. Look at /g/, it’s not about technology in half of the threads, but simply about transsexuals in a transphobic way, because people take the bait, get angry or join trolling and end up replying to it. The poster gets their dopamine kick and the janitors (moderators) seem to enjoy it as well. The other half of the post simply are text editor X is better than text editor Y and other similar. And then there are threads baiting with sexually provocative images, again, to get people to reply.
I’m wondering how far the the federation is being planned. Is it just that an user on Gitea instance A can discover projects on instance B? Or can an user on instance A also open issues, pull-requests etc on a project on instance B, assuming the user has the required permissions?
If it is the latter, I believe that would be awesome. Right now, I feel like as a starting project, if you want to be discovered and get contributors you basically need to be on a large, centralised code platform or instance such as codeberg, gitlab.com or github.com. I hope that it will lessen the barrier for people already on another Gitea instance to contribute to a project on another instance.
Just like a kitchen knife can be used by murderers does not mean that the kitchen knife manufacturer should actively monitor who is buying their knifes and go after the ones with bad intentions in my opinion. In the same way, I don’t think free software should be licensed under such an ethical open source license.
First of all, it’s just very hard to enforce I’d imagine. Would people who do not care about respecting human rights to begin with even care about such a license? You’re not stopping “evil” by making up rules that “evil” people don’t follow almost by definition. At least the license is more clear about what is considered as acceptable and what not unlike the infamous “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” clause, for which I have to give it some credit.
Everything you can make can be used for wrong things and I suppose you’ll have to accept that you’ll never have full control over that. The only thing that can stop something to be used by people with bad intentions is to never create it in the first place.
Besides, I´d rather have my enemy use open source software instead of closed source software. If they use open source software, it’s easier to get a grasp on what they’re capable of.
For software like Lemmy with federation, I’d just say to block those from federating to your own instances and stop giving those instances attention. As long as the flagship instances that federate with each other keep up a positive attitude, I would just ignore those extremist people’s instances
I basically use cash wherever possible, otherwise by debit card, iDeal (almost all Dutch webshops accept it), SEPA and as a last resort PayPal, even though I despise that company.
I feel bad for everyone who has to use credit cards. While you do get cashback, some form of insurance and possible some rewards for using them, you as a consumer basically have to pay for it due to stores increasing prices due to the high transaction costs (I believe about 3% of the transaction, but It’ll likely be different for everything else).
Compare that to the Netherlands, where as far as I’m aware, stores have for debit cards a flat transaction fee of about €0,15 per transaction and a monthly fee. Although that obviously differs from payment provider to payment providers, a store for which I work has a monthly fee plus one for closing a shift.
Anyways, due to the cheaper costs of accepting debit cards almost every store accepts them, while credit cards mostly aren’t accepted in physical stores. It seems like most Dutch web shops do accept them, but most people here don’t have credit cards at all. I assume they are mainly for people who buy outside of the Netherlands.
This is also the reason why I have PayPal. It sucks, but it sucks less for me than a credit card and is widely accepted.
Well, if there are a few messages every 12 hours, there are at least people active. I would say it’s better than nothing.
But the situation is a bit like the chicken or egg problem: “no one is active, so I won’t be active as well”. It’s not going that’s going to be solved by yet another new chat client or so. Just give it some time and communities will become more active.
And Matrix got bridges to other chat clients, which are pretty nifty if you want to be more active on Matrix. While it somewhat ruins the spirit of decentralisation if you use it with non-decentralised networks, it’s better than nothing ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The minimum age is also what made me delete my account on the spot.
Such an overreaction to be honest. If you think it’s wrong to meet up with people under 16, don’t meet up with them. As for minors, don’t allow them to meet people 3 years older than them if that’s what you’re afraid of, although it’s still an arbitrary limit. I can imagine a 16 year old open to meeting 18 year old people, there’s nothing wrong with that in my opinion.
Look, I can go outside and meet with 16 years old as an adult. Does not mean I do it and it does not mean I support banning minors from going outside, because they might meet adult people.
Note that I’m from a country where:
- The minimum age for sex is 16.. Does this mean I approve of 16 year olds having sex with, for example, 26 year olds? No. Are they allowed to, according to Dutch law? Yes, if both persons are able to consent wilfully. Note that in order to be a prostitute or to act in pornographic film, you still need to be at least 18.
- Online communication with a person of 16 or older with the intention of sex is allowed. I’m sure since is something that is of the main thing Alovoa provides, having a minimum age of 16 would be enough. I assume the creator is from Germany and I assume they have similar laws as the Dutch in this regard.
- If you’re a dad and you take your own child to the park, without the mother, you aren’t seen as a child predator.
I’d rather have USA users disallowed from this instance rather than yet another service needing to accommodate for the prudish USA. The USA users could have their own isolated instance with their own rules. I assume USA users wouldn’t be matched with European users anyways, due to the large geographical distance.
I do not have a problem with opt-in telemetry, but know that if you use providers like Google or Yandex, I won´t even think about opting in. It also would be nice if I can choose what information gets included and what not.
Also, the merge request hasn´t even been added in. I hope it won´t make it in, due the use of Google Analytics as provider.
The EU is democratic but I feel like I have no idea what’s going on compared to the democracy in my country.
For the national government I am able to vote for a party and follow all live debates on television and the internet. The (national) news usually reports on important decisions being made and important debates happening. They provide us with a summary on what happened and so on. How our democratic state exactly works is all taught on schools.
But for the European Union? I know I get to vote for a party once in a while, with almost all parties having a similar name and stances on subjects as the parties in the parliament. But what happens next is unclear to me. These national parties seem to join up with the national parties of other countries with similar views? I suppose they debate once in a while in Brussels? And there is this Ursula von Leyen who seems a very important person with the EU, but what here role is? No idea. All I know is that, once every while, the EU creates or updates one of its regulations. These then have to be implemented by each of the member states.
All which our school teaches is that there is an EU, it gives a short overview over its history and they tell us about their goals. But what happens between election and the creation of regulations? I have no idea.
Nevertheless, I usually agree with the decisions the EU makes and I’m in favour of the EU as a power house against the USA and China, for example. The euro, free trade and free travel are all things I take for granted, I could not imagine my life without them. In my opinion, they are worth the taxes and so on. I just whished that some countries, including my own, the Netherlands, could be more relaxed when it comes to having to pay money to poorer countries in the EU. And the EU should definitely be more strict against states that are de jure democracies, but are turning into de facto dictatorships.
2 children on a bike? Seems doable. Or what about a carrier bike, if you have more?
I admit that these children are all quite young, but starting from age 6, children should be able to cycle by themselves. (Note: this opinion is from a Dutch perspective)
I’m not against cars by the way, you could own a car and several bikes. Use the bike when possible and the car for everything else.
A fast and not too memory hungry selfhosted, decentralised chat (Matrix) client, with support for E2E-encryption and voice chat (Mumble?) integration.
Bonus points if it could have different types of “chat” rooms with different user interfaces, such as ones for “ephemeral” content, such as general banter and memes. These could let their content expire after a certain time and have typing indicators and so on.
An other type of room could have a more of a forum style interface, which encourages “slow” chat with more lengthy and content-rich posts. It could remove typing indicators and not automatically display new messages to encourage people writing their thoughts out in one message, instead of feeling pressured to send their messages as quickly as possible.
Basically an all in one application for communities but FLOSS. I don’t necessarily think an all-in-one community application is needed, but Discord proves that’s what people seem to want.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some audio watermarking is already going on right now. Universal Music Group has done this for a while on their music. In 2008 UMG was using watermarks unique to each distributor, not to each person purchasing or streaming the watermark. I’m not sure if UMG is still doing this, in the update on the first blog post linked, some said it has stopped, some say it hasn’t.
The technology to do it is already there. I’m not surprised if near-inaudible audio watermarking exists now, I’m not an expert on this field. To put an unique ID per subscriber can be done as well on a technical level I assume. I believe whether this is done depends on the streaming service or download store, because it comes at a cost of using more computing power on their servers. I don´t know whether it is allowed by the GDPR and similar laws either.
I don’t know if it is worth it either. If I look around into my social circle, most people have moved towards streaming services. Only a “stubborn” few, such as myself, still—legally or illegally—download music. Based on this, I feel like music piracy isn’t as big as it used to be.