I've checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don't necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren't the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; (c) much, much smaller than Reddit.

Or you could make public transport run faster and more efficiently and faster, reducing the number of people who drive.

It's times like these when I'm glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that's freely available to be viewed as piracy.

These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a "cut", there's a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It's substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I'd do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).

You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don't want to subvert Google. So there's zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.

Expensive and impossible to customise effectively, making it much poorer value than Android. Not that Android is perfect. The instant some form of non-proprietary Linux (like Debian w/phosh, PostmarketOS, etc.) becomes viable as a daily driver, Android is out as well.

Stressful training and work environment, long hours, and the pay isn't that great either. This really is the government's problem to solve - and it's probably not going to be solved just by paying people once to complete their degree, it will have to be throughout their career by providing more pay and more support. Which of course means the public will eventually end up footing at least some of the bill - but the alternative, where education is compromised, will end up costing even more.

Signal. Also, the solution to the "no-one on signal" problem is simply to refuse to use insecure platforms like WhatsApp. If people want to talk to you then, they have to download signal. They might get annoyed with you, but sometimes a bit of coercion is necessary to get people to do what's good for them.

I always just turn DRM off and don't subscribe to these things... Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.

If this kind of thing becomes widespread, then people will find a way to broadcast fake anti-camera signals as well. Imagine a thief breaks into your house and you want your security cameras to record them... but guess what, the thief broadcasts an anti-camera signal and they all switch off, completely neutralising your security system. "Unintended side-effects"

Brave Search is now frequently beating DDG and Startpage for accuracy of search results. It's like using Google 10 years ago when it was actually good but without the ads, tracking and pestering to "log in". Good stuff.

Proprietary social networks that exploit users' rage and addiction-prone personalities crashing and burning.

Social networking should be done on personal devices anyway. Bearing in mind the risk still exists even in that scenario that bad actors can still buy data from data brokers to infer location, personal particulars etc of most users of the big social networks anyway.

No to anything by Meta/Facebook. The platform that refused to show me what I subscribed to and tried to constantly jam pointless political rubbish down my throat, then effectively disabled my account when I removed my data.

I'm also blocking them if they appear in my Mastodon feed.

So why does that sick note from your doctor say, "As a large language model, I can't actually diagnose your medical condition. But here's a note I might write if I were your doctor..."

If I don't like something, generally, I'll just unsubscribe/block/whatever works to make it not show up. On the Fediverse, that usually works - it's not like Zuckville where you say "I don't want to see this" and the platform replies "Great! Let's jam 1000x more of it down your throat" ... that's the situation where I'll remove myself from the platform.

Having said that, I have a few suggestions:

• If you make the 'subscribed' view the default view rather than 'local', that helps if you get someone who really doesn't like something in your local feed but still wants to use your instance. Personally, I use 'subscribed' mostly anyway now I've gone to the trouble of subscribing to a bunch of stuff I want to read.
• With that anime porn... not my cup of tea and I don't generally look at them, but I'm not a prude and honestly I don't see the harm in anyone looking at what are essentially raunchy cartoon characters. But for your own safety and peace of mind, make sure you're well within the law, otherwise the Feds could come knocking - and no amount of anime is worth going to jail for :) Just saying.

It's gone quite smoothly so far - found an instance local to me and joined, subscribed to a bunch of communities, installed Jerboa and set it up - didn't hit any roadblocks.

The cross-server subscription thing is a bit counter-intuitive, but this seems to be an issue that people are already aware of. The Fediverse lengthy signup ritual of choosing an instance is there, but that's just a feature of how the medium works and I'm already familiar with the issues from Mastodon, so it didn't bother me.

Corporate landlords come with their pluses and minuses for renters. In Berlin, the big corporates became dominant and hiked rents up to unreasonable levels, forcing a union-like response from residents:

https://www.vice.com/...

And there is still a shortage of flats to rent in Berlin (actually much worse than Melbourne/Sydney)... go figure.

This was an utterly terrible idea to begin with and it's still a terrible idea for Android apps as well. Apart from messing with ad blockers, this has the ironically "helpful" feature of allowing malware to be force loaded into your browser. If it ends up in Android, some popular app that uses it will get owned and then every user of the app will also end up getting owned as well.

Tapping on a Reddit link from mobile has mostly been pretty similar to this already for me. They have had an issue with DDG mobile browser for ages, refused to show more than a page of content and kept prompting me to "get the app", which didn't seem to recognise my third-party Reddit app... So I just hit the back button. Just recently, oddly, I noticed it had started working, but I'm in the habit of ignoring Reddit links on mobile anyway now so almost never go there whether it works or not.

I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn't find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.

On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other "stuff" on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy's interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit's and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.

The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren't the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit...) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.

Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce "integrity" that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn't mean Google won't keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.