• 12 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

    I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).





  • When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say “everything is political” to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as “political”.

    With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep “everything is political” in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don’t believe it by then, I don’t know what to tell you.




  • Honestly, in hindsight, the variability was the most fun part of Halloween. Every kid knows they could just as easily ask their parents for $10 and get a bag of candy bars, but it’s ultimately the variety of what I could be getting and the unpredictability that made me excited. Was there sometimes weird shit I didn’t like? Sure, but probably just as often, there was some weird shit I did like that other kids probably didn’t, so I think it evens out. There were definitely kids out there who were jazzed to get black licorice, or there were some parents that were jazzed to get a small treat on the side after a night of escorting their kid(s) around since their kid(s) didn’t want it.

    I think giving kids weird shit on Halloween as long as it’s safe, edible, and reasonably palatable is pretty cool tbh and should be encouraged. Like I still remember one house gave out little baggies of Goldfish crackers, or I think another gave out apple slices. One gave out huge sour candy strips. Like I think the best Halloween is one where there’s a foundation of “regular” treats with maybe about 25% oddballs sprinkled in.



  • The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.







  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldMatrix 2.0 Is Here!
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    17 days ago

    Not joining the rooms Element suggests on its own client? Element will show you a list of suggested, popular rooms to join, and a fuckton of these are overrun by spammers and worse. If Matrix has basically zero ability to curate these rooms outside of “here’s what’s got the most members”, then it absolutely should not in any capacity be recommending them, let alone as a way to get started for new users. It’s fucking ridiculous, and before you say “Well why should they be expected to curate the rooms they suggest?”, imagine the fucking disaster Discord would have on its hands if it started recommending servers, and several of its top 100 claimed to be related to popular FOSS applications but were actually completely unmoderated and filled with CSAM and Bitcoin scams.