Partly my fault - I have that page set to auto open on my browser every week

I keep trying it but for me its not ready yet. Finally, in 2023 I can actually boot into it, but I get random freezes for up to a few minutes at a time. So it’s closer, but not stable yet. Hoping that Plasma 6 will be good to go.

Yep good advice, some services have no investment value loss e.g. short term insurance, life insurance, etc. You can switch elsewhere for a cheaper rate and lose nothing.

Unless you have a family or dependants, I’d cut out life insurance and focus on the essentials for now to recover. I also learn long ago to pay my credit card off every month to not have to pay interest on it…

Surely we need some context with this, as what we post is basically publicly visible. Even if we defederate the posts are anyway visible. Our IP addresses are probably visible to the home instance we connect to (or our VPN IP address etc) but how does our IP address then travel off with the federated post to someone following us on Threads? It’s only what travels out through the ActivityPub federation.

What would help with this post was, instead of just a link, maybe extracting the two or three issues that look problematic, and say why. That gives us something definite to actually debate.

For those who have friends stuck on Threads still, this maybe a good way for them to stay in contact. The Threads user gets their login times, IP address, location, etc tracked by Meta, and the Lemmy user with their Lemmy app, only identifies with their Lemmy instance. Threads should only be seeing the post and time that a Lemmy user posts something that is followed by a Threads user.

Each quirky hobby mentioned here, deserves its own Lemmy community!

And I forgot about those one-liner replies with something semi controversial, without any sort of backing. In the few places where I’ve managed my own community groups, I made it a rule that you can disagree, but then have to back it up with some reference. That made it super easy to get rid of trolls, and supported better debate as it forced people to fact-check a bit.

Actually, you are quite lucky with SDR, as there are many such stations on the Internet where you can tune in locally at that location and listen as if you are there. I operate one for listening to our local ham radio frequencies on VHF at https://openwebrx.gadgeteerza.co.za. But mine is very simple compared to some of the more complex one’s available.

I certainly notice it as I post a lot across networks. I always have a title with my content explaining what’s what. There are so many times I have to reply to a commenter, saying “yes, that was what I mentioned in the post”. Clearly, way too many just dive in and comment on a title without even bothering to read the post content. It’s not that the content is pages long, it is usually maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs.

It’s no wonder so much misinformation takes hold, as few take the time to critically comprehend what they’re reading.

I think it is partly just fast scrolling and laziness to actually read the point being made. But then you may ask, why bother commenting at all then…

“Be careful what you wish for”

–Aesop–

I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real “secret chat” I’d probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I’m not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.

Yes and no. It is good and I did one restore of some files that worked fine, but in my case it was noticeably affecting my boot up times, and I reverted to ext4 (boot ups were fast again to less than one minute). For some reason, BTRFS was resulting in quick login, but about 18 mins before my actual desktop was responsive after login. I spend many days trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you won’t have this problem. I had my SSD system drive on ext4 with Timeshift backups, and my /home partition on BTRFS.

So I’m back on my ext4 doing a daily automated backup to a second drive with rsync (LuckyBackup app). I think there are further kernel improvements coming to BTRFS later in this year. But I’ll probably only retry it again end of 2023 or in2024. So if you decide to move, just benchmark your boot times, so you can judge if it affects them badly or not.

That said, BTRFS has some great features, lost no data for me, and I think has a great future.

The bigger problem was a massive buy of Microsoft Cloud services with Office365 etc. It’s moved beyond the desktop and moving back is not going to be easy. MS cloud makes it’s easier to use Linux on desktops, but basically the horse has left the stable.

Credit card everywhere in South Africa for me - firstly safer, but I also settle it in full monthly so avoid bank costs and interest, and I get a lot of benefits back like 35% off fruit & veg, 75% off fitness devices annually, etc.

I do yes as I also have a channel that I do videos for (my only income as I fund my own website without ads or 3rd party trackers). I do make my videos’ ads skippable though. And yes my own browser blocks ads.

But the pleasantness, or lack thereof, comes down to a site’s rules and moderation. The vast majority of people don’t want to be aggravated, and they also don’t really want to pay to use a website.

But scammers and clickbait are everywhere. I think a lot depends on whether they can game the algorithm to force their way into your home feed or not. Many news media sites also use clickbait, and the same goes for politicians wanting to get attention through fear and anger. But I agree very often clickbait crosses the line - it is really irritating when you see a thumbnail of something, and that image literally appears nowhere inside the content.

I mostly follow technology channels though.

I’ve filed at least three reports to X about incitement of violence and racial issues, and each came back as “the did not contravene our policies”. So that was the last time I opened X to read anything. It’s one thing to have a differencing point of view and debate it, but it’s another thing to stir up hatred without any reason or logic. It has got super toxic. I think more, and more brands are going to start realising this. No-one really needs all that negativity and hate, and there are better options on the Internet.

That’s a wide open topic, but for self-hosted I use FreshRSS with Full Text RSS coupled to it to get the full text of feeds. For desktop, I like cross-platform open-source Fluent Reader (just did a video about it today in fact) - again because it pulls in full text and can still sync reading progress across devices through multiple services inc FreshRSS, Nextcloud, and others.

They have just updated the ToS tho to now exclude using your data without permission for training AI. But Jitsi Meet is still a better option ;-)

No it’s not more secure going via Gmail. But what I did was to get the paid Proton Mail and I used my own domain name. So yes plenty pain and time now to slowly update my email address everywhere away from Gmail to my own domain name with Proton Mail.

But hopefully it’s the last time I have to update the email address everywhere, because even if I leave Proton Mail, my mail address is not tied to them, but to my own domain name so I can point that to any other mail provider.

So every mail address I’m changing now, is one away from Gmail. But if course 99.9% of businesses don’t Encrypt mail, so I’m only really cutting Google out of the loop (assuming the other party is not using Gmail of course).

The “popular vote” is also not a perfect system. When there are a majority of rural voters in area, and those voters are poorly educated, they come up with some interesting choices of town mayors, who then have no clue how to actually run a town council and provide services (not inside the US but just saying, no political system seems to be perfect).

Which looks very different if you choose any of the other themes. We have tons of choices, and each of us decides. Some may even want theirs to look like Windows.