Thanks for the reminder about VLC. I don’t use it much any more, but back in the wild west days of audio/video codecs (some of which were paid), VLC would play everything.

I don’t have an answer for you, but maybe you and your friends could get together and start your own? The beauty of the fediverse and all that.

The web pages for Lemmy and kbin have the ability to filter by subscribed communities, as well. I think what most of us are thinking of is a way to view the “All” feed that gives more weight to the smaller communities, which would help us discover new communities to subscribe to.

Limiting myself to free as in freedom (no ads, not free to use because you are the product): KeePass/KeePassXC, GnuCash, Firefox, LibreOffice, digiKam, GIMP.

In my opinion, microblogging isn’t really a conversational platform. It’s a creator and audience platform. That format has its place, as well, but Twitter/Threads/Mastodon/etc. isn’t a replacement for forums.

Vector Pinball

Login issue reportedly fixed with 0.18.2 update: Lemmy.world updated to 0.18.2

116 °F (47 °C) during the 2021 Western North America heat wave
7 °F (-14 °C) in Mammoth Lakes, CA

I’m a boomer and I’m here. Although I’m probably the exception since I’ve never had a Facebook account and you couldn’t pay me enough to touch anything Meta. Probably because I fit the rest of OP’s criteria: way over 30, tech worker, Linux user.

Paper mills smell like hydrogen sulfide - rotten eggs. It’s a byproduct of the pulping process. It’s bad, but some of the smells described here sound much worse. Source: the town I live in used to have an operating paper mill.

I’m on Fark more than I used to be on Reddit. It’s still my go-to for political discussions and kept me sane during the Trump years. Honestly, the community is pretty good there and there’s a nice balance between insightful comments and snark. But Reddit was better for hobbyists, niche interests and tech discussions and I’m hoping those communities will develop here on Lemmy.

As @flloxlbox said, it will either happen organically or users will decide to merge communities, like the Android community did. It’s the way federation works, it’s not something that can be forced on people.

Same here. I’ve worn contacts for 50 years (my user name isn’t a lie). A few minutes of inconvenience at the beginning and end of the day, and I don’t have to think about my vision aids the rest of the time. And I can walk in the rain and still see!

GNOME. Been using Linux since before GNOME Shell was a thing and when it became a thing it just clicked for me. In my opinion, it’s by far the most polished DE and provides the most elegant and intuitive launcher and workspace switcher of any DE or OS I’ve used. At least they did, until they fucked it up by moving from vertical to horizontal workspaces and made the workspace previews so small you can no longer see what’s in them.

Which is the downside of GNOME. Sometimes their developers are their own worst enemies. Fortunately, there are usually extensions to fix the most egregious “enhancements”.

Debian Stable (Bookworm)

This was posted yesterday, but definitely should be in this thread, as well: Facebook’s Threads is so depressing

From the look of things, they’ve been having some issues. Last night you couldn’t view photos in kbin.social threads from kbin, either.

Very good point! I don’t think the threat from Meta is technological, they also seem to be good citizens on the the open source projects they collaborate on.

I am far more concerned about how Threads is going to change the community. Not the vapid influencer crap, but the toxicity, divisiveness, bigotry and disinformation coming out of Facebook.

Yep. Being a part of the fediverse gives Meta a defensible argument that (1) they are not stealing Twitter’s intellectual property as Mastodon already exists and (2) they are not monopolizing the Twitter-like social media environment as any of their users could move to Mastodon if they wanted to.

Kbin already federates with Mastodon. It’s not a single feed, though, they’re on separate tabs. Kbin currently works okay, but per the devs it’s an early beta so there’s more polish and features to come.

For the record, I’m not sure that combining the two platforms in one feed would be desirable for most users. It seems to me that Lemmy and Mastodon serve different purposes: Mastodon is for broadcasting your opinions to mostly-passive followers, Lemmy is oriented toward conversation.