We asked in our instance census about use of lemmy-like platforms (reddit, hacker news) and most people said they still used them in some respect. Only 7 our of 49 who answered this question said they never use them, over half use them equally or more than Fediverse alternatives.

Personally I use Facebook messenger, well I normally use Beeper because I don’t have facebook on my phone but I still use the platform to connect with people. And video call on my laptop from time to time.

No they are different backends, they just use the same protocol.

Teseraract, Photon, and Mlmym are different frontends for Lemmy.

PieFed has completely separate frontend and backend code from Lemmy’s code.

Yes they are completely different front and backends but they use the same protocol (ActivityPub).

This is why open source is so important. If the dev goes crazy and blocks all sorts of stuff the community can fork the code and remove the block list, while still remaining interoperable with Lemmy, other Piefeds, Mbin.

That’s way different to say Facebook where they fight to the death to stop you using an app that isn’t their official one.

Piefed isn’t a fork of Lemmy, it’s completely independent code. They just speak the same language.

The browser shouldn’t even know I have the Play Store.

Every app on your Android phone knows every other app you have installed. GrapheneOS are trying to solve this but it’s challenging.

Yeah Valve doesn’t ship to NZ. I have a Steam Controller 1 and have previously had an Index as well, but I had to freight forward to get them, and I seem to recall needing some trickery of changing the Steam account to another region to get it to work.

I’ll be trying, but there’s a 99% chance it’s not available in my country 😭

Huh interesting! I see playing on their website that an equivalent laptop is more expensive in the DIY version, it’s just that the starting price includes no RAM, storage, etc.

So the DIY is for people who want to bring their own parts, not for people who want to get all the parts then save money!

Framework sells DIY kits so the European dude assembling the laptop could be himself!

To be clear and so people don’t get the wrong idea, Graham Linehan is the creator of The IT Crowd, he’s not in this meme.

Last I remember they had said over and over that they were not working on it because their only Linux team was focused on Proton VPN, it seemed to be excuse after excuse for years.

Have you tried owning the place you work?

I guess it depends on the specifics of what you are worried about. I have a catchall set up for a domain I own, and so I can make up an email on the spot. I’ve never had trouble getting those accepted.

But for random internet stuff I tend to use either Firefix Relay or Simple Login. I use these most of the time and don’t normally have issues, but if I do then I use my own domain.

I think these relay email services (which are not temp/disposable emails btw) let you set up with your own domain too.

There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.

I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.

I don’t remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It’s possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do think it’s an idea worth exploring.

In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.

I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.

There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).

I use a dedicated Raspberry Pi (5, previously had on a 4).

I host everything else on a different server, the HA one is dedicated. Pretty nice because then it can run HAOS and basically manages everything itself.

One factor in keeping it separate was I wanted it to be resilient. I don’t want stuff to stop working if I restart my server or if the server dies for some reason. My messing around on my server is isolated from my smart home.

I also have a separate Pi (4, previously on a Pi 1B) that runs Pi-hole, on it’s own Pi for the same reason - if it stops working or even pauses for a moment, the internet stops working.

Lemmy is a different kind of platform. Twitter wasn’t for me, but I never clicked with Mastodon either. Some people like the microblog format but I just never got it, or maybe I never worked out how to use it probably.

I turned it off because it kept triggering when I (or someone else) was talking to my Home Assistant Voice Preview (which the blog says it won’t do…). I also never really worked out good uses for it. My HAVP is in my kitchen/living room area, and is mostly used for playing music and kitchen related things (setting timers, unit conversions, etc).

If I ask home assistant on my phone to play music, it plays it on the HAVP speaker in my kitchen. I don’t really have a need for timers or conversions outside of the kitchen where I already have the HAVP so didn’t find any use for it on my phone.

It does, yeah. If you aren’t averse to cloudflare then it’s a great option.

From memory I think it’s limited to http/https traffic, but that’s normally not an issue, just have all your services behind a reverse proxy.