2007 MSN was still very popular for high school students here in Australia

Actual discussion is still possible in the Fediverse, at least for now.

Somewhat recently I was talking to a close friend about their brother and how he has been acting, particularly how he approaches discussions with those around him. My friend was telling me about a discussion they were having, and the only response his brother could give him was “you are uneducated and misinformed”, but couldn’t actually formulate an argument to back up his side. I physically laughed when he told me this and jokingly responded that he “sounds like a standard Reddit user”, my friend paused for a second, chuckled, then replied “he basically lives on that site”.

I’m yet to have this kind of online interaction on the Fediverse, and that is nice ☺️

Don’t care about follower numbers, and post what’s on your mind or engage with others as you see fit. The big one for me though was curating my tabs (feeds), using Antennas was easy for this. So for example, my ‘Home’ tab is an Antenna tab with a bunch of keywords and phrases that I’m looking for, for example ‘linux gaming’ and ‘retro gaming’.

Took some setup, but super happy with it now

Not your question, but just want to talk about the Mastodon bit.

I’ve always been interested in microblogging platforms since Twitter originally released, but I’ve never been able to really engage with them. Over the years I tried Twitter numerous times, later X, tried Bluesky a couple of times, and also tried Mastodon and failed to stick with it.

However lately I’ve switched to Sharkey (using Aria on Android), which is a fork of Misskey. Sharkey federates with Mastodon, Misskey, and a couple of others that I’m mind blanking on right now.

It’s only been coming up to a month since I switched, and I’m absolutely loving it! Plenty of engagement, the Antennas keywords and phrases thing is awesome, and it’s just really nice to be on a platform like that without a damn algorithm dictating what I consume

I just made an account on Bookwyrm last week but I’m kind of confused with it. Is it just basically public reviewing of books you’ve read/reading?

Well this name was definitely a lesson to double check what you read from a post when just scrolling on by…

I saw this video show up as well, and it got me thinking what are mine?

I tend to do tonnes of research before buying any tech. But potentially it would be my TP-Link BE6500 WiFi 7 router. Like it works amazingly well, and it solved all of the routing and bandwidth issues with streaming and gaming on WiFi, however I don’t think it was worth the price or headache getting it working.

Otherwise, not sure if we’re regarding this as tech, but I purchased the Illumi Classic IPL device a few months ago. I made the wrong decision here, I should have spent the extra and picked up the Illumi Pro instead.

Not sure of local pricing in your area, but would a ThinkPad T480 or T490 be within budget? The AMD version (I think it might be the T495, someone correct me if I’m wrong) would be my pick personally.

I think it has to depend on a person by person basis. For example, I have to be left for me to figure it out, if anyone else tries to get involved then I guarantee I will be burnt out after a day and then just give up for a while.

Others may benefit from the help and guidance, but not all of us unfortunately 😔

I’ve gone up and down throughout my life, and these days I am quite an awkward individual in person.

However, what worked for me in my early 20s when I was probably at my most sociable was finding a hobby to interact with people in. Even something as simple as a monthly book group can work wonders on your social skills

Timber and truckers is what I was originally taught. I remember it taking a while to get the truckers hitch down then out of no where it was like ‘snap’, had it ever since lol

gamedate.org really deserves to be promoted around gaming communities way more than it currently is!

So many older but still online shooters could be somewhat revived (even if only briefly), would love to play some Day of Infamy with a full server again!!

Thanks for those!

Yeah seems to be much closer to that FB design than what I remember with Friendica. I tried it about a year ago and moved on from it pretty quickly, same experience that it just seemed buggy and slow.

I’ll keep an eye on Fedibook, thanks again!

Never heard of Fedibook, nice I have something new to research, thanks!

I just recently moved on to Misskey/Sharkey to replace Bluesky and X for myself. Signal is the next one I need to look into a lot more as I still use FB Messenger and need to get away from it

Hi! No not at all, at least for me on both devices (Skyline and S25) Blorp ran great! If I get bored of Summit I’ll immediately return to Blorp ☺️

I’m a pretty geeky IT person, who is trans, watches anime, reads manga, and plays WoW.

Yeah I’m basically a walking stereotype at this point 😅

Okay I just reread your post, as I missed the bit you mentioned about instances like blahaj hiding the downvotes.

So a couple of questions for you.

You mentioned the communities aren’t on the instances that hide downvotes… Are these communities that live on instances that are not federated with for example blahaj.zone?

And also, you mentioned that instances that are hiding downvotes is also not a solution due to the downvoter and others still being able to see the downvotes. So I ask, why is that an issue for you? Why be worried about fake internet points that aren’t even really tracked here (unlike Reddit for example), that you can’t even see? Actual engagement in discussion between people is far more important no?

Orrr, move to an instance that has the downvotes disabled. They don’t exist if I can’t see them ☺️

Not sure if it’s available on F-Droid or not, but I’ve been using Summit lately and absolutely loving it. Blorp was my previous favourite, but I prefer the bit more modern and clean UI of Summit.

I did try Jerboa about a year ago when I first tried Lemmy, but quickly dropped it due to UI/UX issues I was experiencing at the time, but I would personally just stick with Blorp if it was between them.

Voyager was another I tried previously. Earlier I tried on my other phone (HMD Skyline) and consistently had performance issues with the app (long load times, occasional crashing, janky scroll). When I got my S25 I thought this would be solved with the more powerful device, and while it was much better than before, I still had performance issues.

Hope this helps a little!

This is going to be all about how they implement it imo. There was a specific line in that article “for those who want it”, if they go for an opt-in approach which only then installs the AI capabilities, then yeah okay I don’t mind as an end-user.

If however Canonical implement AI into Ubuntu without being opt-in, then I’m out and never turning back.