Endymion_Mallorn

No such thing as a free beer, no more than there’s a free lunch.

Does the EFF call it Free?

Most social media has a leftward bias. Avoiding politics in any form of social media now is like trying to avoid plankton in ocean water - you might be able to do it, but you’ll need a really tight filter.

Hasn’t been my experience, but I’m mostly in a sphere of scientists, creatives, and memes. A couple art museums post some great stuff too.

I don’t remember MSN Messenger being able to handle IRC chats. If it had, I wouldn’t have needed an IRC client. But Threads won’t drown out other voices, they’ll just add voices to the conversation. There’s content on Threads that’s worth following, and I don’t think it’s valuable to lose that because of a few engagement farms that you can either personally block or defederate.

Somewhat selfishly, I’d suggest she try Mbin instead. It allows her to interact with both the microblog side of the fediverse (including bridges) and the thread side, from the same interface.

Threads is a great example of a company acknowledging that the open web exists and bringing content people want to places where they want to be. I’d like to be able to interact with everyone through one or two accounts, not have to maintain a Meta account, an Mbin account, a Google account, and all the rest.

You may not like it, but I believe the open web is about things like Threads being federated - individual platforms interacting freely, no matter who built them.

Oh neat. I’ve been aware of this for a while and I’m glad in an academic sense that it exists. I guess I would need more people that I care about who are on Bluesky.

Now if only there were instances willing to actually host anything worth watching.

WP Engine has always seemed a very weird business to me. WP is free, and many hosting & domain providers just offer it for free with your hosting. If you don’t want to host yourself, why not just use WP.com and do a redirect? I’ve just never understood the value-add.

Better yet, I’ll request the admin specifically to federate with Threads, so that I can move across the stuff that I care about to mbin from the Threads app.

At least it’s not Windows?

If it’s harder to use than Dailymotion, Odysee or Rumble, most people won’t use it. Creators, certainly, won’t consider it. The thing that made YT, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc., big is that you didn’t have to necessarily worry about the “hard stuff”. You just shoot the video and push the upload button.

PeerTube needs more instances with the push-button option for creators to adopt the platform at first. The big challenge is, no matter what you do for compression or P2P or whatever-have-you, someone, somewhere, will have to pay for it. If it’s not creators, it’ll have to be either the viewers (not happening when the platforms listed above are free-to-watch), advertisers (not happening if the user base is too small and the content isn’t brand-suited), or sponsors (not happening if the user base is small and made up of free/libre/pirate enthusiasts). That’s part of the issue with PeerTube’s adoption and I don’t see a way to overcome it. We need an equivalent to mastodon.social or lemmy.world for the video side of the fediverse. Trust that creators and communities will break off, but have a canonical location with very few limits. Preferably you also would prefer that said canonical location doesn’t defederate from anybody.

Thank goodness. PeerTube needs wider adoption. We need creators as much as we need consumers.

Heresy indeed. The Codex does not support this shell.

Mail clients, torrent clients, and word processors are fundamentally different from browsers. Yes, we can implement their base functions inside a web browser, but that’s not their function, or their core UX principle. Also, you forgot NNTP. Thee is no value in moving away from HTTP(S).

Okay, that’s his opinion. Like his opinions on many things, I feel entirely free to disagree with him.

Absolutely not. It should run on HTTP, as a website. Unless you want to build a client which would be somehow fundamentally different from a web browser somehow (note: Lagrange and Gopher Browser are just browsers), which would somehow be able to display data from every use of ActivityPub / “the fediverse” in a different context from a web browser, then no. What we need to build is website software more in line with kbin / mbin, collecting together all the different information of the fediverse into one interface.

I’m not going to be tolerant of the watermark, and I don’t feel like using PowerShell to get rid of it - plus there’s drivers to consider. It’s just faster and easier for me to grab an activated OEM version for the computer I have.

Key bindings can be changed, but I’ve never found the place to do it easily in the GUI in Mint. I touch the Linux command line for curl and ping, and that’s about it.

I already play Wesnoth, and I haven’t touched 0 AD in years. I prefer OpenTTD, Oolite, Endless Sky, and Minetest, along with occasionally poking at WarZone 2100. But that doesn’t replace the DOS and Win9x games from my childhood. I don’t use Valve’s DRM platform (nor the one from Epic Megagames), and it’s rare for me to pay for anything on GOG. But there’s no other game that exactly hits the fun for me of Sid Meier’s Covert Action, Shadow President, SimCity 2000 & 3000, Starfleet Command II: Orion Pirates, or a couple dozen others. Yes, it’s nostalgia. But it harms no one.

As for the tax thing, I’ll look into it, but I don’t expect it will do what we need. We need to pay for the more expensive software because of our tax situation (don’t want to get into detail for obvious reasons).

Sometimes the impetus to change OS is not UX related.

In my current case, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with liking or not liking Windows. I actually like Windows 9x, XP, 7, and 10. I bought a computer and wanted to install a clean OS on it (it came with Ubuntu, which I loathe visually and general UX-wise, because it feels like a Mac and seems like no matter what I do, something breaks). I had a choice: go through the effort on my other machine of pirating Win10, or just install Linux. I decided to go with Mint, because it supports the software I want and there’s a feeling of familiarity, so muscle memory still works. I had to learn things like using Alt+F2 rather than Win+R, but I feel like I’m in a safer environment to learn than just “here’s a new OS, good luck”, because I can access those things in the GUI until I learn to do otherwise. Having Wine and DOSBox-X are because I have software that’s for Windows or DOS that I like. I still haven’t found a solid replacement for Notepad++, for example; and that’s not including games.

There’s also the “use Linux to make old machines work better and safer” use-case, especially for older people. My mom, for instance, is almost 80. She knew DOS, and she’s been acclimated to Windows over 30-odd years. If I want to make her older machine safer and more efficient, I’d install Mint on it compared to something else (I actually can’t, because her tax software is Windows-only and does not work correctly in Wine), because again, she’ll feel that she’s in a safer environment. She already uses OpenOffice (specifically not LibreOffice, because of the print layout differences - seemingly small things like kerning and the like can have a significant effect), and Firefox. She was using Thunderbird for a while but switched to webmail, just for simplicity. I’d have to walk her through PySol, AisleRiot, or another solitaire program, but I’m pretty confident that I could do that. So it should work like Windows for her, except for all the things she won’t use.