• 9 Posts
  • 367 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Not an American but to be honest, both Google and Apple are appalling. Google openly steal all your data and sell it. Apple do similar but on a smaller scale but also claim they’re all about privacy. Both make it difficult to use alternative app stores but with Apple its actually impossible. Phone vendors can and do install their own awful bloat on Android phones. Apple force you to use webkit for any browsing you might want to do, Android’s native GUI is a mess. Nothing Apple put on their devices is open source so all their claims of privacy can never be verified. Both companies constantly try and impose proprietary standards or charge you a bajillion pounds for a fucking pen or some such bullshit.

    The key difference for me is I can put something like Calyx or Graphene on an Android device and use a whole open source ecosystem of alternative apps which vastly improves the privacy of my device.



  • As others have said, money is most of it.

    But I also remember that what seems to have prompted his last few years of total unhinged behaviour was his daughter turning her back on him. That seemed to be the point of no return for him.

    So there is part of me that thinks he wants to have access to and control over data. The whole nazi salute wasn’t about money, it was about ideology and I think controlling data will allow him to go after communities of people as part his ideology.






  • I’m not suggesting its impossible to improve the UX but I a) I think thats going to be an incredibly low priority for the developers and b) I’m not sure what changes can be made to address the essential conflict between the whole point of the fediverse - decentralisation - and a sign up process that essentially hides that without taking away an informed choice.

    In reality, its not really that much of a difficult concept to grasp and there are loads of resources like fedi.tips etc to help people. If the communities and content was of a sufficient quality (as oppose to quantity) people would make the fairly minimal effort to understand why the fediverse is the way it is.

    And if people don’t or won’t thats really their call.


  • The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that’s never going to be a truly workable thing.

    The vast majority of people don’t want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I’ve ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.

    These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.

    Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.










  • It’s been wild reading news stories coming out the US over the last couple of weeks.

    Not the stories themselves of course, but the air of shock and alarm in both the stories and in the comment sections - and its not just Lemmy, its everywhere there’s a comment section - when you knew what he was going to do, he told you what he was going to do - why are you now in any way surprised or disturbed?

    The main question I have is that I’ve been hearing from Americans for decades now how gun ownership means you have a 2nd amendment based militia ready to go to protect the constitution and yet in the face of what is completely obviously the initial stages of a coup, I see no signs of that militia. Where are you?


  • UK experience:

    • Open all your windows to air out for at least 20mins every day. If the place is prone to damp, twice a day. This includes days its sub-zero outside
    • Cheap rugs in strategic high traffic places protect shit carpets
    • If the landlord supplied it, the landlord fixes it
    • Get a windup torch for when the power goes out (it will)
    • Massive electric blankets to wrap up in rather than having the heating on 24/7
    • Charity shops for cutlery, glasses, mugs, plates. cooking utensils etc. Just make sure to clean them well before using.
    • Heavy thermal curtains in front of external facing doors and between rooms (if open plan).
    • Make sure you know exactly where elec/gas/water meters are, make a note of their reg. no. and take regular readings.
    • Get storage solutions that stack high rather than wide.

  • I fully support the autonomous right of all people to make informed decisions about their own lives and on paper the idea is a no-brainer.

    But unless the legislation surrounding it is very, very tight it could easily be misused or abused. We already live in societies where people with disabilities - particularly learning based disabilities - are seen as having less value. I have overheard conversations where people pass comment on people with disabilities such as “Can’t be much of a life”, “would’ve been better for them if they’d died at birth” etc etc.

    Amongst the first group of people the Nazi’s targeted were people with disabilities that they referred to as ‘useless eaters’ and subhuman.

    I’m not suggesting that laws allowing self-euthanasia are akin to fascism so don’t Godwin me. All I’m saying is that without very strong legislation and a lot of checks, laws like this can be used to justify a lot of things.