Eugenia

Sorry, but in my book, nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies random violence. Your justification of it sickens me and I’m surprised that you got so upvoted. I’ve been on the breaking point from things that were happening inside my own home as a kid, but I never took it on my little brother, or other kids. Instead, I was taking it against the actual aggressor (my father), even if it resulted in more beatings and hairline broken jaws, and put the knife, or the gun on my head. So, yes, I’ve been through some shit myself. But I protected my brother and my mother as much as I could. Doing random violence, as you described it, against people who might have their own cross to bear is not justified. EVER.

And yes. They CAN act against Bezos, Musk, and the board of Exxon. They can easily find where these people are, paparazzis certainly can. Every second day we have pictures of Bezos with his darling gf. Get organized so the locals can take it against him when he visits somewhere. But you don’t act against your fellow citizen who is also a victim of oppression and climate change, or destroy classic works of art. What kind of BS is that??

The Matrix is unprecedented indeed. Perfect intro too.

It was good for the first 2-3 first episodes, but it was going down for me later on. I didn’t actually finish it.

I can’t find it on either Izzy or f-droid. I can only find infinity for reddit.

My favorite is PixelFed. I’m an artist, so Instagram was important for me, but for a few years now it’s absolutely terrible (no reach at all with their special algorithms). PixelFed fixes all that, it replicates the feeling of IG as it was 8-10 years ago: chronological feed, tag-based, no extraneous features. I’m really enjoying it, as I can finally grow again my followship as an artist: https://pixelfed.org/

Is it on f-droid? I don’t have google play store, I run a totally degoogled phone.

I grew up very poor in Greece, and my mom used to give us a slice of bread that had poured white sugar on it, and… olive oil. It was many years later that I realized that these were deconstructed donuts.

deleted by creator

their drivers aren’t open, so there are always crashes and bugs that they can’t be fixed, because nvidia can’t test with all the distros, or all wayland implementations, or games under linux. Intel drivers are the most rock solid under linux.

Not a bad DE, but nearly unmaintained lately. The development of it has been crawling.

I have two personas. One with a google phone with FB (to talk to my mom to Greece), and a macbook. And another with a de-googled Murena eOS phone and Linux laptop. One of these two personas will die once I move to Greece next year. I don’t mind not being able to talk to friends on FB or IG. If they want to find me, there’s email, or they can join federated social media. I won’t miss them.

Dark themes are not as readable for me.

deleted by creator

Maybe some bigger subreddits are dying, but the UFOs and Experiencers subreddits are as active as ever, if not more. I guess these remain big there because these subjects are very censored in other social media (e.g. youtube) and never show up in search results (they show only videos from tv news). Reddit also censors them (e.g. some posts that contain more info than usual), but you can still see these posts when you go to these subreddits directly.

deleted by creator

I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.

Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.

So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.

Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.

On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.

No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.

As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.

Love PixelFed, I just like chronological and tag based systems. This way every user gets an equal opportunity to be seen. Unlike what’s happening with recommendation systems, where only a few super stars are pushed by the algorithms. If anyone like traditional illustrations, here’s my profile: https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/495699973550816234

I found nothing weird about its design, in fact, it just looks like an iphone, that billions use at this point.

Ok, but why not use Murena /e/ OS, that has MicroG pre-installed (and in fact, they’re the main developers of microG), and the ability to install google play apps if you want? They support even more phones than LineageOS at this point, and their codebase was originally from LineageOS. I installed e OS on my Moto G7 Plus, and it works great!

There is no point disabling the google app when the rest of the phone runs on Google services, and the rest of the google apps. The tracking will happen regardless. If you don’t want to be tracked by them, you need a de-googled version of Android, that doesn’t run their apps, or their services. I’m currently using /e/ OS, an Android de-googled fork, by Murena: https://murena.com/ on an older Motorola G7 Plus. No google apps, and I make a point of not installing any popular app that depends on google’s services. I only use open source apps found on the f-droid open source store. Yes, that means that you won’t have games, or FB or IG, or twitter (unless you use them via the browser). But I don’t need any of that. I now only use fediverse open source apps, plus the basic phone apps found on the Murena eOS, like email and notes.