I feel like less common or more specific hashtags tend to work better. If you try to follow common words like art or music or dogs, it can overwhelm your feed and a lot of it is mediocre. If you browse those tags, you might see more specific tags used along side them focusing on what you actually want.

Have they been using AI art? All of their art that I’ve noticed has been from David Revoy.

And it’s a fairly small open source project that only started working on the phone app last year. It’s not that surprising they haven’t gotten apps for every platform yet.

Personal data storage can be decentralized, although that’s missing the social part of the social network.

Identities are set up through a centralized system that in theory they could change, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Relays supposedly can be decentralized, but need to handle all data on the network. So they require massive hosting costs that keep going up as more people use bluesky. Only large corporations can likely afford to run them, and that hasn’t happened yet.

I think it’s because instagram, youtube, and facebook are way bigger than reddit, so people coming from them are less likely to go to lemmy.

But the way the fediverse works means they are useful even if they aren’t that popular yet. People can follow peertube accounts from mastodon or lemmy. I follow tons of mastodon accounts from my pixelfed acccount. And friendica can handle almost any type of content.

That’s definitely a factor to consider, but running binary blobs that you don’t have the source for is also a risk. It comes down to what threat vectors you think are important and what risks you’re willing to take.

It’s probably because they use busybox instead of gnu utilities so it’s not technically GNU/Linux, but yeah.

Short answer is Trisquel if you like Ubuntu/Debian, Parabola if you like Arch, and Guix if you like frustration.

The libre kernel is a bit of a pain regarding wifi and bluetooth, and depending on your graphics card the drivers aren’t going to run quite as well. You might need to get new a wireless card/usb, since there’s only a few modern chips that work with it.

There’s a list of distros on gnu.org that use the libre kernel by default, if you want to look at more options. PureOS is based on Debian focused on privacy and security. Hyperbola is based on Arch with 32 bit and BSD options.

Personally I use Guix, which is an amazing abomination with awesome features that most people don’t care about. I wouldn’t recommend it for most people unless you are coming from NixOS, know a lisp dialect, and/or are willing to put in a lot of effort.

Looks good. I’ve always found it annoying that lemmy doesn’t do this by default.

I’m not sure about the license though. Creative Commons recommends against using their licenses for software, since it doesn’t include terms regarding source code, doesn’t handle patents, and it’s usually incompatible with free software licenses.

Identities are somewhat decentrallized, but it’s pretty different from ActivityPub. People can host user data separately, but it isn’t really an instance. It is technically possible to have other relays (basically instances), but requires handling all the data on bluesky to connect to it. It would cost probably 50-100k USD/year, and that number will go up as more people join or if there’s more relays.

I feel like it’s really far from being open. Besides the training data not being open, the more popular ones like llama and stable diffusion have these weird source available licenses with anti-competitive clauses, user count limits, or arbitrary morality clauses.

Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.

• Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

• Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.

New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

There’s lem.el for Emacs.

There was another one but it doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

It usually implies it’s weird in an old-fasioned way though.

Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.

If you check “I’m an advanced user” in the settings, then hit the “More” button in the dropdown a few times it’ll show the more advanced interface that lets you choose which third party domains to allow. It doesn’t work quite the same since it blocks both content and scripts per site, but I find it good enough for my usage.

edit: You can technically block just scripts per 3rd party site, but it involves manually editing the content type for your rules in the settings. It’s not part of the main interface, so I never bother using it.

UBlock Origin will block content within Firefox, and do a better job at it than AdAway. AdAway tries to block ads on the whole phone, including embeded ads in a lot of apps. But unless you root your phone, you can’t run AdAway and a VPN at the same time.

The creator of pixelfed is working on a tiktok alternative loops, although for now it’s in private beta.

For a starting point that is available now, you could look at Pixeldroid, an open source pixelfed app.

Besides the ones already mentioned:

• The FSF has some channels at https://framatube.org/a/fsf

• There’s a bunch of KDE related channels at https://tube.kockatoo.org

• Blender has several channels at https://video.blender.org

• https://peertube.touhoppai.moe/a/shichimi has Krita tutorials from the creator of the Pepper and Carrot webcomic.

• https://tilvids.com/a/martin_owens from someone who works on Inkscape.

• https://tilvids.com/a/togglejam looks at the science behind fictional games and shows.

• https://diode.zone/c/andrewtropin has a bunch of scheme and guix related videos

• There’s some anarchist channels on https://kolektiva.media like CrimethInc and subMedia.

A couple of gaming related accounts/channels:

• https://subscribeto.me/a/gbryant

• https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam

There’s also sepiasearch.org for PeerTube videos.