I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Another hot tip: don’t refer to people as “normies.”

Phew.

Lol. I read this in an entirely different context, like you were implying that they’d go to hell for this.

That’s really cool that someone thought to preserve this and put it on display in a museum. It’s like a modern historical artifact from the golden age of computing.

We’re done here. That’s the one.

Jeez. What a pathetic loser.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread because I would also love to know if I’m missing out on some good games journalism out there. Sadly, sites like what you’ve described are increasingly rare in the modern era. Nevertheless, here are a few that come to mind:

NintendoLife is pretty great for this if you’re looking for Nintendo-related news, reviews, interviews, and feature articles.

One of their affiliate sites, Time Extension, is also really good for long-form articles and retrospectives about retro games.

And while it’s mostly just news, like you said, Polygon will sometimes surprise you with some really excellent feature articles that have a lot of thought and research put into them.

Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

I just took Mastodon for a spin only a week or so ago, and it felt much less active than most of the communities on here do. Just my anecdotal experience, though. I couldn’t find more than a handful of Twitter-migrated accounts on Mastodon that I cared to follow. There just wasn’t much happening on there that I’m interested in when I last checked. I’ll look again.

Oh hell yeah they are. I’m a tech enthusiast, myself. Don’t even get me started on Wednesdays because I’ll never stop.

Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.

This is sadly still the case and one of the main reasons I use Samsung phones today instead of Pixels. One Hand Operation gives me more ergonomic and easy to use gestures while also playing nicely with third party launchers.

There’s just no way in hell I could use the pixel launcher as my daily driver. It’s too simple and lacks the bare minimum customization options that I would need to be able to tolerate it.

Not yet, no.

Is this an assumption or can someone else confirm this? I just started using Connect, so I’d love to know for sure.

It is already pretty great. The one thing that annoyed me enough to stop using it (for now) is that it displays two refreshing spinner animations whenever you pull down to refresh the feed. It’s a small thing, but it irked me enough to just stick to using the mobile app for a bit longer.

UPDATE: Nevermind, it looks like this was fixed in a recent update. I’m back on Connect now, and it’s pretty great. Probably the best Android app for Lemmy right now.

Adguard is the best option for system-wide, rootless ad blocking on Android IMO.

It’s the best because it also performs cosmetic filtering to reclaim the empty space that most other blockers leave behind after removing an ad from a web page. This makes web pages look much cleaner and is something that I value in any adblocker, mobile or otherwise. The free version works across any browser or embedded webview instance within apps, and the paid version filters all ads within apps as well. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Completely negligible impact on battery life as well.

One UI has been crammed with features for years now, many of which would be very nice to have in Pixel phones. Maintenance Mode would be good, I guess, but I can think of several others that would be far more beneficial to have merged into AOSP in some form.

For example, One Hand Operation + is the best implementation of gesture navigation in all of Android IMO. It’s quicker and more efficient than traditional gestures, more customizable, and plays well with third-party launchers. It’s one of the killer apps that makes it hard for me to consider anything other than a Samsung phone these days, especially since Google has made no attempts at fixing the wonky behavior of the native gesture navigation and third-party launchers.

Haha, wow. This is a perfect metaphor. Well done.

Thanks. I’ve tried all of the options suggested in this thread so far, and this one seems to be the best for search/discovery.