What is actually your problem with Android FF? I use it every day on my phone.

Yes, it’s not as snappy as Chrome, but besides that everything works perfectly. In addition to that: Fully fledged ad-blocker like on desktop, one big reason why I no longer use Chrome on my phone.

I already knew that we’re fucked. But scientist said more around 2050 or something. The way things are progressing right now the next 10 to 20 years are going to be dicey.

It’s also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It’s the same user accounts too.

That’s like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.

Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?

This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.

Turns out if you don’t pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.

Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn’t understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There’s probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.

This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.

But as OP said, they already failed several times. That’s like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.

See here:

So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?

For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren’t comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).

I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.

I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I’m also a software developer.

And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.

I mean that’s years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I’d never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they’ll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don’t understand) is broken.

A lot in the game is based on the SCP Foundation, which is basically supernatural stories written from the view of the foundation (with plenty of redacted material). There’s tons of stories, see here: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

Control very much feels like a bunch of SCPs thrown into a game, but with only half of the story behind each one. Just giving you glimpses unfortunately.

Control was cool, but at the same time a massive letdown. Like you run into cool SCP like stories and entities and then when the tiny sidequest is over in 5 minutes that’s it, done. Some things you never even find out about later on, just like the writers had a cool idea, put the first few sentences there and then didn’t know how to continue.

Felt like constantly getting blue balled, compared to just reading SCP posts.

But that has always been a thing. Just like Reddit mods banning you from their subreddit just because you posted in another subreddit they didn’t like. It sucks, but it’s nothing new.

If either a server admin or a community mod doesn’t like you for what you’re doing, they can kick you out. It’s the same as if this was an old time forum and you pissed off the admin.

With lemmy you have to watch two things:

1. Trust the instance admin you sign up with, this is where your account data lives, the admin can read everything on your account. Hell, even your password if they manipulated the instance code, so use a random one

2. Trust the moderators of the communities you interact with. If you interact with a community and the mods there don’t like you, they can just remove your posts for example. Same as with Reddit

A random person outside of your instance or communities you interact with can’t do much. They can “steal” your posts and comment data and see your votes. But that’s it. They can’t block your account or kick you out of your favorite communities. They could obviously harass you (just your account, not your email), but then you can block them. Or ask the admin to block their entire instance.

They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).

Marketing and content boost for the start maybe? Mastodon has come up a lot recently (hell, even in local radio), so Meta can use this to promote their own product. And already have content right there for users joining Threads, it’s not a blank slate.

After the initial boost and when sucking up millions of users they can just defederate and have their Facebook (or rather Twitter) 2.0.

The moment you make votes anonymous (which would theoretically be possible) you open up a million ways in which votes can be manipulated. So congratulations, that ad post from some random company has 12k upvotes now.

Only alternative is still connecting it to a user, but only registering that they voted (but not if it’s an upvote or downvote, that’s anonymous again), but then you can never change your vote again afterwards. So if you misclick the downvote button there is no way back.

With the current solutions in place, if you want to remain anonymous: Don’t create an account, just lurk. Or don’t upvote/downvote/comment on things. It’s as easy as that.

Just like putting your real name online and then complaining when others can see it on Facebook… your account is as anonymous as you want to make it.

I mean I didn’t upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It’s all personal information.

On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.

Here it’s public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?

Just don’t vote then? Reddit also told advertisers what you’re into, it was just over backchannels with money involved.

Or create an account that has no links to your private live, then you can vote as much as you want.

That’s why I just use my own KeePass database synced over Dropbox. Zero issues, it’s free and nobody is targeting it. Even if someone got access to my Dropbox they’d still have to crack the encryption.

You take away power users and people fed up with Reddit and the casual user who doesn’t care is left over.

If you look at blackout votes it was usually around 4 to 1 in favor.

During and shortly after the blackouts there were a ton of upset casual users calling the mods cunts, the blackouts don’t help, stop holding other users hostage, give me back my content!!!

Those users don’t care about third party apps, mod tooling and so on, they just want to browse the site. These angry users got the loudest while protestors took a break or left for the Fediverse.