I am, with the obvious username. I mostly only post in /r/flashlight now, as it’s the most active community anywhere online for that niche interest.

I’ve had at least three different people on different continents provide my Gmail address to various services. I’ve ignored most messages meant for those people, but one gave it to his lawyer when he was charged with a serious crime for which his conditions of release forbade contact with children. I took the time to tell the lawyer that’s nothing to do with me.

I was among the first hundred people to join Reddit.

Including Edge for Android, which puts it in a compelling position for certain use cases.

Getting uBlock Origin to work with Chrome requires a workaround, and that is not scheduled remain available long-term.

Yes, I prefer FOSS. The degree to which proprietary software actively works against the users’ interests has increased significantly over the past couple decades, as has the tendency for anything successful to get enshittified. I’m not a hardcore ideologue about it, but if a FOSS option does what I need, and it usually does, then that’s what I use.

Some important software on my laptop:

• Arch Linux
• KDE
• Firefox
• Darktable
• Emacs
• Betterbird
• Joplin
• Syncthing
• VLC
• Bitwarden

All FOSS. I play a few games that aren’t, and a lot of things I access through the browser aren’t. I have a Windows 11 install I used to boot somewhat frequently for games, but don’t since I discovered Lutris takes the fuss out of running most games on Linux.

And on my phone (italics indicate not FOSS):

• LineageOS
• Waterfox
• Thunderbird
• Signal
• WhatsApp
• AntennaPod
• Waze
• Google Maps
• Joplin
• KOReader
• Syncthing-fork
• VLC
• Connect for Lemmy
• Bitwarden

I have FOSS fallbacks for the things that aren’t aside from a couple group chats in WhatsApp. One of those is toying with moving to Signal, but collective action problems are hard.

What characteristics did I cite as reasons I like wired headphones? Was audio quality among them? Did I ever claim to be miserable or that anyone should feel sorry for me?

I have a phone with a headphone jack and I’m content with it. If I break that one, I know what I’ll replace it with, and that model also has a headphone jack.

Oh, I see. You’re trolling. Got it.

I’m not making myself miserable. I’m a happy wired headphone user. They’re quick to switch between devices and battery-free.

Unlockable bootloader.

Maybe that’s not underrated on Lemmy, but mainstream reviews never even mention it.

Who is she to decide who deserves to live? God?

Of course, I’d hesitate to accept such a judgment from a god who presumably made those people that way. That would be a dick move.

As for pronouncements about mental health, I will accept citations, or maybe credentials. With neither, hers have no value.

It looks like Session has video calls in beta.

Note that most services requiring a phone number for registration don’t actually require that phone number to be connected to a SIM card in the device you’re using. That may be helpful depending on your use case.

It does not appear to require a phone number. It even looks like an email address is optional.

The character limit is hardcoded in two places. They could, and should make it a setting, or just eliminate it.

I tried Hubzilla, Akkoma, and Mastodon. I still use Mastodon. I have the ActivityPub plugin on a Wordpress site, but haven’t yet migrated that site’s Mastodon account because Wordpress doesn’t offer a great experience for consuming content from accounts I follow. I may try out Wafrn.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the microblogging category. Low friction to post and interact is good. Character limits and a complete lack of formatting, not so much. I set the character limit on my self-hosted Mastodon instance to a big number I never approach; I routinely exceed the default 500.

I was aware of Lemmy for a while, but didn’t join until the Reddit API fiasco because most of the activity was weird political extremism until suddenly a ton of people wanted Reddit alternatives and new servers sprang up.

I joined Reddit in 2005 and liked the format. I had been self-hosting Mastodon for a while before I joined Lemmy because it had long been evident that a centralized corporate internet is not exactly great for its users or the world at large. I had also experimented with Hubzilla and Akkoma.

I looked at Lemmy a couple times before the Reddit API fiasco and it was just a couple servers that were dominated by people who thought Stalin did nothing wrong and killing Uyghurs is just fine and/or not happening. I was not motivated to participate at that time. When lemmy.world launched, I joined it because I had the impression mastodon.world was well-run.

The effect of a downvote is that fewer people see the comment. If you think fewer people should see my comments, I can assist you with that by not posting them.

If you feel I’ve missed your point rather than understanding and disagreeing with it, feel free to articulate it more clearly. Your claim as I understood it was life is harder and crueler (for most people, most places) these days (than at some point in the past).

Why would I continue this conversation with you if you’re going to downvote my replies? That’s rude.

No. I live under a rock and haven’t noticed that there’s a global increase in far-right movements, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a race between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to see who can boil the oceans faster to make better slop factories.

Bad news makes for good headlines, and we absolutely have serious, pressing problems worldwide. Despite that, ask yourself if you’d rather live in 1925 than 2025. 1825? 1725? Think about how the average person lived and died in those times. When was life actually easier and kinder for most people?

life is harder and crueler these days.

I think you just found the popular belief that I disagree with.

Compared to most of human history, life now is pretty good. This article uses childhood mortality (globally 4.4% versus 50% for most of human history) to make the point. There’s still lots of room to improve - the EU has a tenth the global average - but humanity has made incredible progress on that front over the past two centuries.

Looking at a smaller time scale, the human development index is trending upward everywhere since 1990.