Also a note that captial one has a similar service for their own credit cards. Def not as good as privacy.com, but still useful.

Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that’s in real life or on the internet.

Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship

Absolutely, it’s a good move. I’ve been recommending that to friends who are hesitant to branch out of Debian and are over Ubuntu.

I’m hoping mint eventually makes LMDE their default. Tho until then, even just a baseline install of Debian is easy enough these days.

I’m on endeavour for my devices, def a solid option!

I like what the mint team does on their end but I’m over Ubuntu. If mint shifts their base to debian I’ll consider it again.

You can apply arkenfox or Betterfox to fennec in some somewhat hacky ways via adb (or less hacky if rooted)

Wild that people are concerned when Bazzite has a completely different underlying toolset vs SteamOS.

Want arch? SteamOS Want fedora? Bazzite

Tbh Bazzite has an important role going forward: pointing out any bad decisions by valve and offering an off-ramp if valve enshittifies.

Fediverse by design is ideal for institution-based social networks for sure. Each school hosts a server and federates with the nearby institutions (possibly in a limited manner so it’s still focused on your group but you can easily interact with other people from your city)/school district too.

Maybe the school has two servers: one for active students, another for alumni. Some configuration for letting people say “only fill my main feed with stuff from my graduating class +/- 2 years” and so on. When you graduate, you get auto migrated to the next server.

Hometown sort of tries to do this for cities as a Nextdoor replacement (and even nextdoor for a long time tried to keep things hyper local with optional visibility elsewhere until they caved to ad money and NIMBYism)

This. I basically didn’t use my facebook for the last 6 years and i left it deactivated most of the time. My thinking was that people could use messenger to reach out to me (and my family has mostly been using messenger for stuff anyeay) but even then, that only proved true for a handful of circumstances, and the people who did make use of messenger or a non-deactivated account all had my phone number anyway.

Would my experience be different if I was more active on facebook? Eh, maybe. Maybe I’m an oddity, but most of my high school and college connections barely post on facebook as it is, if at all. I didn’t lose much by finally giving it the axe last week.

Tiktok has been useful for several groups that are normally extremely supressed with other algorithmic social media. Tiktok isn’t geared towards the “what will make you angry therefore keep scrolling” or “what will make you buy more things” motivations that facebook et. al. are geared towards, so it will actually show you things you care about. It also has a tendency to show you opposing viewpoints from time to time, which makes it surprisingly useful for deprogramming people from misinformation.

For people with specific medical disorders or conditions, tiktok was excellent for finding others and sharing information. For people of different minorities that are normally supressed on social media, it was excellent for building community.

So sure, if all you watch on it was dancing teenagers, that’s what you are gonna get: Vine 2.0. If you curate your feed a little then it’d help you branch out from your interests without the primary goal of keeping your eyes peeled to it or grabbing more ad revenue.

if you are part of a group that tiktok was basically the only social media network that had ever been helpful for, it’s a big deal that it’s going away. Its not about the format of the videos, but the algorithm and its focus on your interests rather than making money.

Not exactly an unbiased chunk of evidence there, is it?

You can hide your number on Signal so people can’t start conversations with you unless they have your QR code/link.

But even if you leave it visible… it’s really not that big a deal. Tbh, thats a good feature if you want to use Signal as a way for people you don’t often interact with to securely communicate if they have your phone number but can’t utilize encrypted RCS. Once Apple gets on board with encryption then it’s less important for Signal to fill that gap for casual conversation.

Signal may not be perfect for all use cases. But it’s pretty easy to navigate for the normies and its got most of the features people would miss from whatsapp/facebook messenger. I got my family converted to Signal this week from facebook messenger and it went rather smoothly. Plus, Signal has been around for a long time. Even some among my less tech-literate family had already used it in the past, but everyone had heard of it so it was an easy sell.

The reality of communication nowadays is that there is no one size fits all solution. Signal, XMPP, Matrix, whatever else all have their pros/cons.

I know there’s been a lot more discussion around SimpleX lately, but tbh, the sudden noise about it + the VC backing just feels more like a coordinated advertising campaign and that makes me less interested in it.

I’ve used linux on my laptops and non-gaming devices for a long time, but it took me a long time to switch my gaming desktop over. I’ve felt i could use linux full time most of the last 8 years (and especially for games since 2020 as i rarely play anything with anti-cheat anyway), but i only went linux on all devices as of 2 years ago when i built a new gaming PC so it required starting from scratch anyway, and aside from a few components i intended to retain for the new one, i could easily drop back to play a game if i ran into problems.

They won’t do it, whether they just fear change or think it’ll break stuff or they can’t bother

Not everyone has the time nor feels the need to just rip and replace on a dime. Not everyone has the luxury of multiple devices to gain confidence. Some people only have a handful of hours a week to play games, so switching OS isnt going to be an immediate priority sven if its their desire.

And I’m not going to lie, I don’t hate them or debate with them for it, I just hate the bold lies they tell just to get with the crowd

The world already has enough things to tear us all down, why flip a table and possibly be unable to game for a time just because doing it right away, according to you, is the only way to be honest or whatever. A vocal desire to dump windows doesnt equate to lying. Let people be excited about linux even if they dont make the switch themselves. Maybe their excitement inspires someone else to take the plunge who wouldn’t have done so otherwise.

Also, if you felt the need to write this rant, seems like you do kinda hate them.

At least don’t lie that you’ll move to Linux at a goal post that you’ll just move whenever you get close, maybe say that you’ll move to Linux when you finally get a new pc with a new disk or something?

even tho i knew i was “done” with the windows since like 2018, I just simply waited until it was convenient to switch. Should i have qualified every conversation where i discussed linux gaming with this? Idk, maybe just let people be excited about something, even if it takes them a long time to get to it.

Maybe they will, due in fucking 2028 or something when they invent a really easy way to use built in Linux tools to move your files from NTFS to Linux and then when you launch steam you have a perfect library of Linux compatible games that are as good or better than windows

Uh… This has existed a long time. Mounting ntfs on linux is rather easy. Even a windows boot disk. Just point steam at the library folder. In fact, my steam library is installed on ntfs in case i ended up dual booting or using gpu passthrough to a windows vm for a few items. If you’re gonna sit here and virtue signal about who is a real linux gamer or not maybe you’d at least know something as basic as mounting ntfs in linux…