Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.

Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.

And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.

shifted to the point where a double Sieg Heil at your president’s inauguration is within normal discourse

Haha thank you. I’m not even American but to me it’s pretty shocking to find out that this place, world of all instances, is too ‘extreme’ for people. Maybe I really am a dirty radical but I think that if people who consider themselves democrats are still fucking clutching their pearls about the left wing being too left wing while Elon Musk does open nazi salutes and trans people get their rights and dignity stripped away, then it’s no wonder the USA is so fucked.

You guys clearly need a new political party because your choices are overt right wingers, or spineless right wingers that like to pretend they represent the left.

Edit: maybe the bad men will see the light if we all hold hands and sing kumbaya. I’m sure that all of the people who are already finding themselves victims to this will thank you for taking the high road and not scaring too many centrists.

It’s all good. Thank you for taking the time out to try and help out here. And for being involved in building cool platforms for people to get together. You guys behind the scenes here in this indie web (or whatever you may call it) are heroes for giving us alternatives to turn to for our Sonic the Hedgehog shitposts and whatnot. Now more than ever.

I’ll report back if there’s any difference when I get things sorted on my phone. Which is going to be a little bit of a job, so I’m not going to get it done now at 23:04. But it needs to be done.

Update: not entirely sure what else to try but one thing I’ve tried now is disabling the global dark theme in my settings as well as Firefox (aargh my eyes). This seems to make no difference either. I even switched to the “Trans Pride” theme and it remains the same. The only settings that I’ve modified in accessibility is to make text size smaller.

If you have any suggestions of what to try, I’d be happy to. Otherwise I’ve been needing an excuse to start over on this device. So a reflash might be in order.

Haha well this is odd. Definitely wasn’t on the high contrast theme.

And after switching to the Card Shadow theme, the entire thing just stayed the same with the very dark background and white boxes.

Using cropped images to reduce the size of my post but basically it looks the same as the first screenshot in my previous post, regardless of the theme chosen and saved. Including the home page outside of settings.

I definitely don’t have any accessibility settings enabled and haven’t encountered this on other websites (yet), although my usage of Firefox is pretty low these days because it’s fairly heavy duty for my phone. I’ll play around with my settings and try a few things though.

We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.

And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.

I’m going to just try again here. I’ve woken up ill today, in a bit of a brainfog and right now just doing this from the Lemmy app that I use is the easiest. I’m going to get all of the text out of the way at the top of this post and put the screenshots at the bottom. First screenshot is the issue I’m facing when I first load the page. Second screenshot is what it looks like after multitasking for a bit and returning to Firefox (at which point the page reloads, reloading manually without the multitasking didn’t fix it however, so I’m assuming this a memory management thing?).

I feel like I should also note that my phone isn’t great at all. And I’m running a custom firmware. So if this is an odd issue that no one else has ever encountered, I’m prepared to re-flash the vanilla firmware to my phone and try again.

I also feel like I should just alert you that in your welcome email, you mention to reply to the email with any issues. However, the email is a ‘noreply’ that returns “address not found”. I’m guessing that the wording in the welcome email is from an earlier time and hasn’t been changed yet.

I think I may have come down with a mild (that hopefully stays mild) case of covid. And it pisses me off because I’ve got this far without getting it. Apparently it’s doing the rounds in my country and while I can vaguely understand not wanting to shut everything down again and making everyone bankrupt again, they haven’t even bothered with precautions this time or making supermarkets follow certain protocols. So it seems like the fucking anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown, head in the sand idiots have won here.

Sorry for offloading this, just saying that I’m probably going to be even more delayed at checking out PieFed now in the next couple of days. Feeling pretty woozy and lacking in the energy to much else other than scroll.

I’m definitely going to give PieFed a proper go, I’ve even made an account there already. There’s just a couple of things I’m still doing and seeing here.

The web UI on mobile really isn’t that bad, even with the full card view, unlike I thought it would be. I do have an odd issue though where on first load, the page is darker than it should be and text and pictures are surrounded by a white box. And seemingly if I switch to another app and back to Firefox again causing it to reload, it loads correctly.

I’ll send a screenshot from PieFed maybe in a couple of hours or my tomorrow. Been trying to upload an image here in this reply for the last who knows how long but there seem to be server issues.

Very nice! I actually just checked it out in Firefox Android and it’s actually not that bad, not at all what I was picturing in terms of large images taking up more than the screen lol. It does have a couple of graphical oddities that go away with a refresh but I’ll maybe reply to that email that I got when I subscribed with screenshots, like it asked. Later when I’m doing stuff at my desk.

So if it takes a while for the app or I’m not satisfied or whatever, it wouldn’t be too painful for me to just use Firefox until something better comes along.

Saying this here because I already double responded to the other post. I might be stupid and I’m not seeing an option to toggle views but one thing that I can see about PieFed that wouldn’t work so nicely on a mobile web browser (at least in my case) is no compact view.

I’ve edited the title of my post here to include PieFed. It would be nice if some of these Lemmy app devs at least knew about the WiP Lemmy forks (if that’s even the right word).

Sorry for going on here but just want to say, reading through all of the features for Piefed I already like what I’m seeing very much. Before I’ve even tried an account. The approach and philosophy towards moderation in particular makes me confident that I wouldn’t be instance hopping much there based on those sorts of disagreements.

Edit: also something nice is the ability to use the same import/export from Lemmy.

Nice, thank you very much! I’ll definitely be checking it out. As long as I can access these forums or something similar with decent activity and users, I’ll be happy.

Yeah I chose the most populated instance there to create an account and check things out. But the app kind of stopped my exploration dead. It’s a little barebones right now for my tastes right now, especially as far as customisation goes. And I’d be spending more time there than in front of my laptop.

Right now I think the only features that I’m really missing here on Lemmy itself are posting to your own profile and multicommunities.

And it would be great if instances like Blåhaj could enforce their own rules regarding things like downvotes properly, so that they could be disabled there for EVERYONE but enabled in places that still allow downvotes (this should go for individual communities too). The current implementation seems a little like an afterthought on the Lemmy devs’ part.

Edit: the biggest problem that I can see so far with excluding Blåhaj users from even seeing downvotes is that it gives an incorrect perception of things. If a bigot gets 2 upvotes and 20 downvotes, I’ll only see the 2 upvotes.

Apologies for the second reply. Just wanted to say that I checked out mbin and it’s probably more up my alley personally.

But, I still have a barely used Facebook account because a lot of people in my country are still on it. And I’m going to see if the rumours are true and try to spread the news about Friendica there, hopefully without my post getting removed or account being banned.

And if / when people from there give Friendica a shot, then I’ll give it a proper shot too with them. It’ll just be used for different things than what I use Lemmy for.

Basically I would be spending much more time in Lemmy communities, and I thought Friendica could be something extra on top to supplement it.

So I would like to be able to browse instances and communities and choose what I want to see and participate in. Either by subscribing or curating a feed or two. I don’t see an obvious way to do this from Friendica yet. It seems like here I need to scroll through a pre existing feed and curate it from there.

But please bear in mind, I haven’t explored extensively yet or read the link you shared earlier, although I have saved that post so that I can get back to it later in my day.

And another small thing for me (that can be easily fixed by styles and apps) is no apparent dark mode.

Made a quick account there to check things out and not sure if it’s entirely the right fit for the particular use case I had in mind. It’s very much inspired by Facebook obviously, which I was expecting but from what I can tell from a quick look, not the kind of Lemmy integration I was hoping for or imagining.

I’m going to keep an eye on this place though, so that I can start encouraging friends and family to join once it’s easy and attractive (in terms of content) for anyone to join.

Maybe I should ask here. The reason I’m here is because I’m looking for answers to this. As far as the integration with Lemmy goes, how does it work? Is there a ‘Friendica’ instance that anyone using that platform would be posting and interacting from? And in that case, does it play nicely with the other instances?

I’m pretty new here, probably moving to another instance at some point anyway. And I’ve been thinking of looking into these multi purpose platforms that play nicely with others. Because why not have more features and tools to play with, even if I don’t use half of them. It might also fill in nicely for features that are missing here like multicommunities and posting to your own profile.

Also heard of mbin, although an in app search for something like “mbin” seems pretty useless here.

I hear your point but also it might be a mostly first world thing. So kinda like comparing local country music artists to Michael Jackson. Maybe other 3rd world denizens can chip in but here (so this is purely anecdotal) but in my corner of the world, we watched movies and series and played games and shit like we would’ve pre social media.

Personally I’m not even sure what Tiger King is (and not that interested in finding out either, if I’m being honest) and if I go outside and ask around here, I’m not sure how many answers I would get. Possibly I’d get an answer once school is out and kids are around, I guess.

Edit: just to add, I hope this doesn’t go the same way as the time I was trying to explain to Americans that the NBA really isn’t this global phenomenon in every household and that John Cena is probably more famous here.

Is that really the same thing though? Just for a random example of the first actor that popped in my head, Chloe Grace Moretz probably doesn’t have as big a social media following as Skibidi Kid or whereas I could probably find random people in the streets in the 3rd world country that I live in if I just had to start bringing up her name without any further details. Whereas Skibidi Kid is only known by the other Skibidi kids on that particular platform and probably won’t even be a big deal next year, like Dab Kid.

I used to see people express the same sentiment towards YouTubers and it’s the same deal there IMO. SaltyPeeDrinker or whatever might cause a big ruckus in certain circles on the internet and have a bunch of incel fans but outside of the internet and in the real world, nobody actually gives a fuck. Not in remotely the same way as with movie stars, music stars, sports stars etc. These people aren’t that important or significant, they’re just another feature of online brainrot.

Edit: I feel like online ‘content’ creators are related to actors and musicians in the same way that AI art is related to human art or reality TV is related to Breaking Bad.