https://itsfoss.com/bluesky-vs-mastodon/ This is a comparison about Mastodon vs Bluesky.

Misskey is most similar to Mastodon. Bluesky is also a bit similar to both but still the most different one from the other two. All three are different social networks. Mastodon and Misskey are ActivityPub compatible, meaning they can “speak with” other ActivityPub compatible social networks, e.g. Lemmy, Pixelfed or PeerTube. Together, that’s what’s called the Fediverse (different federated social networks being able to talk to each other). Bluesky is based on a similar, but different protocol called AT Protocol. It also means it’s possible for social network services using this protocol to be compatible to each other. But not sure if it’s there in practice yet, if there are even other social networks using this, and so on.

I’d recommend using Mastodon, and in general ActivityPub compatible social network services. They’re all open source, anyone can host a server (which is very important, because if the server operator ever does any bullsh!t you’re not forced to stay there and still can remain on the social network, just from a different node), they’re federated (servers can talk to each other and usually do unless some specific servers are blocked on purpose by the other server), and they’re compatible with multiple services also using the same protocol. And there are “big” networks already existing using ActivityPub, most notably Mastodon and Lemmy of course. Also, Meta’s Threads is also using ActivityPub, however some Mastodon instance hosts have decided to block Meta’s servers (there are good reasons for doing so but explaining this would make this post even longer).

Bluesky is controlled by a company made by ex-Twitter employees, I think its federation capabilities are still limited right now(?), and one can’t be so sure how its future is going to look like under these circumstances. We’ve all seen what happened to Twitter after Musk bought it, so I think only the true, unrestricted open source social network platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Loops.video, PeerTube and so on are the future.

Before Phantom Liberty / 2.0: average game. Overpromised and underdelivered. Good at first but getting boring fast.

After Phantom Liberty / 2.0: very good game overall, fixes most old problems. PL by itself one of the best DLCs ever made, sad that such high quality was necessary to save the base game. It’s like the game was meant to be from the start.

Still not on W3’s level overall though, but if you can get it at reduced price it’s a really good experience now. Start PL before the meeting at Embers. After PL, resume that main quest.

The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.

We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.

So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.

It does again show that these people are like irrational, unscientific, religious cultists. We, as in humanity, should aim to progress away from such a dark past, not regress back into one. That way lies madness.

Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla’s own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins happening.

First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.

Well that’s retro but I used to only screw in the side that’s easier to reach because that already secures it while also allowing you to more easily unplug it again.

Larian’s publisher apparently likes DA: Veilguard. https://x.com/Cromwelp/status/1850949592667590700

Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:

• Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
• P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
• Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)

Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.

It’s not the game everyone hoped to be but it’s very good when including the expansion Phantom Liberty. You should give that one a try. It’s probably the best expansion CDPR has made so far, or at least on par with W3 Blood & Wine (I’m still not sure, but I have to give credit for their huge effort with Phantom Liberty). It (alongside the 2.x patches) was CDPRs genuine effort to save the game and their reputation, and I think they succeeded. The base game without the expansion can get very boring in the second half of the game which is why I consider PL to be mandatory. A good time to start Phantom Liberty is just before going to Embers to meet Hanako. If you haven’t played it for a long time, you should play it again with PL, it’s really well made.

Generally, the one is right who builds his argument on verifiable facts coming from trustworthy sources, or at least tries to as best as possible. There are police statistics about crime rates. In Germany for example, crime is actually going down. It’s very likely that Harris is right and Trump is not. This is usually the case, without even looking at anything specific. Trump lies and does baseless/unverifiable claims about pretty much anything, all the time. His followers then think he’s somehow right because he’s anti-establishment or they think that it’s all a giant conspiracy and Trump is the only one who knows the truth, again without any kind of verifiable facts behind it. This can then spiral into pure fact-free lunacy or high fantasy thinking, or cult-like thinking.

That crime is going down, is of course a fact that doesn’t fit at all into the right-wing world view or rhetoric of blaming and demonizing immigrants. So they usually then claim that those facts come from untrustworthy sources or are generally fake news or whatever, again without any verifiable evidence. Because they don’t want facts but easy solutions to complex problems, like minorities to blame for whatever problems they currently believe in. If they radicalize themselves enough, and this can happen fast on today’s internet within their own echo chambers, they might become so far removed that they become lunatic and/or violent, and then they become dangerous. Fascism is very similar to a cult.

I don’t think this will help much, even if the outcome is what most think it will be. There are already lots of radicalized people within the right-wing fascist bubble who will not believe anything that scientists, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, or people from a different political spectrum say. They only believe what their own bubble and their own media/leaders say. They are unfortunately already so far removed from any sort of objective fact-based reality that re-education will take a long time (maybe for the rest of their lives) and will not happen in time for the current elections in USA. Also, their rhetoric has already become quite 1930s Nazi-like. They are already using various dehumanizing or demonizing terms for their perceived “enemies”, like vermin or low-lifes. It will probably become worse over time, and since the rhetoric is already bad, it’s likely that violence will be the next step for them.

You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.

Also, Google isn’t immediately killing Ad/Content Blockers like uBO, they’re doing it slowly. Which is much smarter. It will mean less resistance. Boiling the frogs (users) slowly has always been the best way of eventually reaching a certain goal, without too much resistance along the way. If you push the goal too fast and too hard, there will be massive resistance, backed by an immediate media backlash. You have to wait that out, spread it out, so that users and media forgets about it again. Also, uBO Lite for MV3 browsers is less effective, but many users won’t notice a difference yet. Next steps will probably be to make it less and less effective over time, while claiming it will be better for the users overall, like offer better security from malicious addons that almost no one installs anyway, or whatever.

It’s probably related to the phenomenon called “gish gallop”. It’s when someone outputs a ton of falsehoods and other junk very frequently, and other more rational individuals have to refute all those claims and pseudo arguments, look up sources, look up what’s true and what’s false, and so on. There’s an asymmetry in effort - it’s much easier and way faster for the trolls to spit out junk, falsehoods, misleading content, misleading memes, false claims, and so on, than it is to refute those and gather facts, and to do that, you also have to be very careful to make it accurate or else the listeners might go “boo that’s wrong as well, they both suck!”

And then there’s the phenomenon that even bad advertisement is advertisement. Someone whose name keeps coming up, such as Trump, because that name is constantly all over the news, each and every day, must be very important since the name is repeated so much. This automatically “elevates” that person in the minds of some voters, even though the reason for his constant mention is purely negative. So the more reports about Trump’s weird ramblings, the more he is automatically advertised.

I think it’s like a combination of such unfortunate phenomenons. The result is that real politicians have to be accurate, careful, constantly maintain a professional attitude, and carefully counter Trump’s weird claims, while Trump can just continue to spit out hostile nonsense all the time, which is so much easier.

I’m not sure what can be done against such strategies other than education and media literacy, which is probably becoming weaker over time in society. You don’t vote for proven anti-constitutional fascists, ever. If you do, you’ll always be much worse off than if you hadn’t. Even when the alternatives might also not look great overall… it should be your moral duty to always vote for the least-worst option, which means NOT Trump.

~1930ish Germany made such mistakes. Don’t repeat them. You’re now at ~100 years later and are supposed to learn from grave historic mistakes. So please show that you are actually wiser than the people ~100 years ago and don’t vote for proven fascists.

Probably because Google is actively and frequently banning many Piped or Invidious hosts, and is generally currently at war with “alternative frontends” to YouTube in an effort to make users browse YouTube directly and consume ads there, or buy YouTube Premium. This is in line with their current fight for more ad revenues across their products and services. You probably have to either search for another public instance which isn’t banned (yet) from accessing YouTube, or host your own instance.

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS

Well it should be, because anyone who votes for Trump is voting to regress the country into an eventually authoritarian, fascist regime. It shouldn’t be a close race. It should be the majority voting to prevent that.

I’ll do a (simplified) Windows analogy, if you’re already familiar with Windows.

Microsoft Windows is closed-source/proprietary, which means only Microsoft has the source code for it, and only Microsoft is legally allowed to create or distribute copies of Windows. “Windows 11” for example is a “distribution” of Windows containing the “Windows NT kernel” (core of the OS) alongside other important software to make the OS usable, like a boot loader, service layer, graphical interface, desktop environment, and lots of included “system” applications like a file explorer, a web browser, apps to adjust settings, apps to display menus and task bars, and so on.

“Linux” by itself is just the kernel, the core of the OS. Which is by itself not a “usable” operating system yet, just like holding a CPU in your hand doesn’t allow you to use it yet. More components are needed for that. Since Linux is open source and under a permissive license, anyone (even you) can go ahead and create an operating system made with the Linux kernel. If you do that, this is called a distribution or “distro” of Linux. Since there’s not just one company allowed to do that, many distributions exist. They all made their own operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Even though hundreds of distros exist, only a handful of them are actually popular, stable, secure and recommended for general use. They all use similar, but sometimes different software to include in the distribution. Like the Linux kernel, most of that software is open source so it can also be modified or extended.

Since “Linux distribution” is rather long to write, people often just write “Linux” but mean the whole distribution, not just the kernel. These are just common inaccuracies in communication, but what the person meant should be obvious from the context.

Common and recommendable Linux distributions (= full, usable operating systems) include: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Debian. These are full operating systems and they all include the Linux kernel at their core. Of course, the similarities go further than that. Most distros are similar enough that if you’ve learned one, you can also use any other with little additional things to learn. However, some distros are deliberately a bit more different or tailored to more specific users or use-cases, for example Arch targets more experienced Linux users because it’s a very minimalistic distro, it expects the user to know which packages he wants to install. It pre-installs almost nothing. You can think of this like “Windows Server Core” where it just boots into a minimalistic terminal by default, no usable GUI yet, but you can of course install the desktop environment and everything if you need it and make a full-featured desktop out of it. The distro just doesn’t want to preinstall anything which you later might not like, which is why it gives you the choice, but that makes it a minimalistic distro and it’s harder for beginners to use that way. Other distros like Mint are much more similar to the client editions of MS Windows in that they preinstall everything the user needs for a desktop OS and more, so that the user can boot into and use the desktop as quickly and easily as possible.

And then there are even more special-purpose distributions like Kali Linux which includes things like penetration testing tools (i.e. “hacker tools”), which makes it a distribution for IT security people, so they can boot into it and have access to most needed tools right away without installing much else (also good on a bootable USB stick). But usually, in general threads like this one, people don’t talk about specific-use distros, but about generalist distros which you can install and use as a regular desktop OS.

Desktop environments also exist on Windows but there’s basically only one, made by Microsoft. In the Linux world there are several to choose from. The most common ones are: KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE. These desktop environments contain window managers or compositors, task bars or panels, menus, various tools like file managers, process viewers and text editors, and various background programs. This is all needed for the user to have what is commonly known as “a desktop environment”, because if you didn’t have one, you’d be basically staring at a screen containing at most a cursor and a wallpaper, with no way for you to interact with anything. Of course, these can look and feel different from each other (just like Windows looks and feels different than MacOS), and they have different features and strengths and weaknesses, but their goal is always the same. And as usual in the open source world, there’s not just one project but multiple, and out of those multiple a couple are popular, viable and stable enough so that they are usually included in most Linux distributions. Which is why most distros also give the user the choice to have a specific variant of the distribution with a specific desktop preinstalled. For example, Ubuntu also has Kubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled KDE Plasma) or Xubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled XFCE). These can have various names but in the end it’s just the base distribution (“Ubuntu”) with a different preinstalled “face” so to say (and you can change those faces or desktops from within the same distro, of course). Most other things are exactly the same between those distribution variants.

As a new user, you don’t need to learn about everything. Just pick an easy to use generalist desktop distro like Linux Mint and use the default desktop environment or variant which they provide or recommend by default. You can start experimenting with more choices later on if you want, but you also don’t need to. If you have something you’re comfortable using, then you can just stick with that.

Won’t be like that much longer. Windows continues to become worse, Linux (desktop) is on a steep upwards trend. I’ve been using desktop Linux since 1998 and desktop Linux has always been at or around 1% market share, for 15-20 years it was just flat basically, which tells the story that only geeks and nerds used it, which is the story that everyone’s familiar with.

But these days? It’s approaching 5%, and most of that climb was just in the recent 5 years. That’s insane. At the same time, Windows continues regressing from about 95% market share in 2009 or so to something like 70% these days. And this tells the story that people are growing increasingly fed up with Windows (and rightfully so).

In all other areas, Linux is already the dominant OS. It dominates servers, supercomputers, mobiles and embedded systems. Since Microsoft doesn’t appear to get their sh!t together, it’ll soon dominate the desktop as well.

Is the situation in USA bad? Yes, in several aspects (and getting much worse if the current fascism movement wins out in the end).

Is the situation in China bad? Yes, in much more aspects.

Most important goal for USA right now is to ensure they’re not regressing into an authoritarian, fascist regime. Because then, the situation for US citizens will start becoming really similar to China or Russia. After that, goal is to combat climate change. And preventing World War 3.