Posting about guitars, linux, bicycles, and lgbtq+ stuff. politics are somewhere on the bottom left.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • well, i eschewed motion plugins for so long, but i recently installed easy motion, to quote “maybe use it minimally so i don’t have to change my work flow too much”. i pretty much gave up using w, e, b and f within a day of installing it, replacing each of them with a more efficient reach for the same number of key presses. similar situation with ultisnips, thinking it’d be overkill for my needs. these both work really well with opening zsh commands in $editor too.


  • this run on xubuntu i think. when i first switched to mint (xfce) a few years back i’d reinstall every month or so because i broke something, yes with enough misguided tinkering linux mint can be broken. then i’d spend a week-month on other distros, mx linux, peppermint, all the ubuntus, then manjaro that got me on to minimal installs, then arch btw, then endeavour, with my own awesome or openbox config. i thought i’d settled down for 6 months or so, but the threat of a bad package was always there (even though it never happened). when i got my latest laptop i installed mint again, with my openbox config. after a while i started noticing things weren’t running quite right, so i just thought “instead of changing everything, just change what i need to” and went with xub for slightly more up to date repos. turns out i can get pretty much all the functionality i had with openbox out of xfce. so i’ve managed to stay on one install for about 18 months!





  • my expectations weren’t very high, given how the twitter exodus played out, seeing some of the people who made very bold statements about never coming back… coming back… and subscribing to twitter blue.

    you’re never going to take down a giant like reddit, or twitter, or facebook, or whatever, in one swift blow. they’re probably going to get through this. and your average social media user doesn’t want to bring down the status quo, they just want to look at funny pictures of dogs. and that’s fine. the real victory to be had is showing people that things can be done differently. enough people will stay on fedi servers to keep a community going, and by the time the next bunch of disgruntled posters come along there will be more content to keep them engaged





  • the torrent analogy is pretty good actually, ISPs can block certain connections so a good chunk of users miss out on the swarm, and the swarm misses out on them. where federation differs from choosing an ISP is it’s far easier to switch your provider to this service than it is an ISP.

    and where a given instance draws the line on censorship isn’t the be all and end all of whether other instances federate with them. as i see it, though my understanding of this comes from mastodon, even if one server decides to properly block another, a third server might chose to limit instead, if at all. there are block lists but that requires a very obvious and widely shared red line on freedom of expression, where there are very few places on the open web where you’ll see less censorship than that.

    in the end, wherever a given instance draws the line, is far more democratic than other social media sites. it’s easier to think that twitter, or reddit, or facebook, is more accountable, because there’s at least one guy everybody can point to to blame when something goes wrong, and sure, there’d be something in that, if the scrutiny they get actually changed anything.