Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.
Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”
I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.
I mean, it’s splitting hairs. While the proximity probably didn’t help, I doubt the companies deciding to pull ads weren’t like “sure, we don’t mind hanging out in a nazi bar, just make sure not to seat us next to any nazis.” I mean, some probably were, but there has been increasingly large amounts of pressure on these people and within like 24 hours of each other Elon endorses replacement theory and the MM story drops that Elon is running ads for nazis. There are only so many times you can make a dumb excuse. For lots of us, that was a long time ago. Even the capitalists are realizing now at least that he’s bad for business.
I, for one, will turn to Scalzi on this one:
This is the “So few people find a festering rat’s anus in their can of SpaghettiOs that finding one shouldn’t be considered an actual problem” argument, eliding the fact that the number of rat anuses in ANY SpaghettiOs can should be “zero”
Like, really looking forward to court case when Elon or Yacco have to explain “yes your honor, the thing they said is true, but to get it to happen they had to use our platform!!!” If I had to guess, Elon has to know he’s going to lose, but the point isn’t necessarily a win, it’s to tie up Media Matters in a legal battle that Elon can keep going effectively forever. This is one of his favorite tactics – doing whatever the fuck he wants because he knows the only thing you can do is sue, and he can pay lawyers forever so you’re going to have to blink first.
Home Assistant allows you to select the source, so I tend towards using that. There are other remote specific apps that allow similar.
I think I found this in the Home Assistant forums, which are generally a great resource. I’d also warn that you might want to be careful going this route. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as just popping the SSD in and installing an OS. IIRC, and I know I don’t recall why, I had to DD a disk image to it. That said, there are lots of these thin clients all over ebay where it is literally that easy.
If you have money, I would recommend AppleTV, especially if you have an iPhone. It’s by far the best platform in terms of not being solely an advertising vessel and sucking up your data, and integration with the iPhone even just out of the box is pretty great. That said, they’re the most expensive by 2-3x.
Runner up is def Roku, which is much worse, but still pretty good.
And then there’s me with a Fire TV, mostly because I buy them when they’re $25 for the max fire stick config, and you can automate through the android debug mode. So when I want to use the device, I rarely use the main interface, which is extremely garbage.
Yeah, I explained this poorly. I do have a led strip on motion sensors that turns on with varying brightness depending on whether it’s dark outside. The dimmer in this case is more for me and my wife to get ready in the morning. She’s got makeup to do, so she needs to the light all the way up, I’m extremely not a morning person so I barely turn on the dimmer.
Indeed. I’ve DIY’d all of that and then some, and especially in the age of YouTube in which you can find a hundred videos from electricians that have been around as long the light bulb, it’s some of the simplest home repair/upgrade you can do. And although you do need to respect the inherent danger of working on currents like this, electrical is actually pretty easy to understand for the types of home upgrade/repair like this you might attempt.
Just be mindful of what you can and cannot do based on local regulations. You definitely don’t want to have your house burn down and your home insurance tell you to kick rocks because there was a code violation somewhere, even if it didn’t cause the fire.
My entire setup is a bit of a Frankenstein as I originally started with more wifi stuff before moving to zigbee. Anyway, what I’m running now:
The whole thing runs on Home Assistant, which tbh does take a good amount of time to understand and get setup, but it allows you to do some pretty powerful stuff. For one, I only have this as my hub, and everything works through that. I can also use this to control all of the equipment without a bunch of intermediaries like ifttt and all that. It also allows me to do things like connect my ikea remote (zigbee) to my wifi bedside lamp. All of the major smart home platforms (google, Alexa, HomeKit, aqara, etc) are also massively more limited in what you can automate. Just that simple little entry automation I posted above isn’t really a thing because most of the basic smart home things don’t allow simple stuff like conditionals (turn on only if it’s dark) and certainly not stacked conditionals (turn on only if it’s dark, and I’ve just arrived, and the door actually opened.) You can also hook it up pretty easily to smart tv’s or plex, so you can do things like “if I pause the movie, bring the lights up.” Or I have a dumb automation that I can tap one button for and it plays a random ep of TNG for when I can’t sleep on a Fire TV, which is just not even close to doable on the pleb platforms.
Anyway, hope that helps.
This is the way. Though this isn’t exactly cheap to start, I have a $50 eBay thin client (including the price of throwing an ssd in there), a $30 sonoff zigbee controller, install Home Assistant, and boom you’re off to the races. Ikea’s stuff (as well as Phillips hue, which I was able to snag some deals on clearance for) and Lutron Caseta are all zigbee so I have complete local control over most things in my house, minus a few wifi pieces that I’ve been replacing over time. We do similar with the 5 button remotes, and I also have a few different button controllers from sonoff. Ikea’s motion sensors have also been rock solid for me.
And yeah, heating is currently my white whale. My home has electric radiant heating which leaves my only option for thermostats down to one or two units that are $120 or so, and I have like 7-8 in total in the home so that’s just going to have to stay manual for now. Space heater isn’t a bad idea, though.
This is what I use as well.
So many things in your house that are probably pissing you off:
Could even make this a little simpler - if somehow you’re not using an SSD at least as the primary boot, please god change that immediately. $50 can easily get you 512gb, often even a TB.
I wish my particular flavor of annoyance could get past this point because it does seem helpful, but I’m even further and can’t really stand a case unless I’m doing something specifically that warrants it.
a few random things:
more niche, bunch of smart home shit:
The vast majority of comments here complaining about Mac and macOS specifically seem to stem from really, really not understanding much about them. This comment is unfortunately not any different.
I’ve seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines.
The FAANG companies that fight tooth and nail to hire the best people who can basically work wherever they want because of their skill like Macs? Surely, they’re the dumb ones.
I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the “modifier key” for the fucking mouse
Originally, and for quite a while (probably early 2000’s) Macs shipped with a one button mouse, and there was no concept of a “right-click.” Originally, they were pretty dogmatic that the OS should be simple enough that one button was enough. You shouldn’t need to hide functionality in a context menu, it should be available through the standard UI. Eventually, that lost out, but they decided they wanted to make context menus* (or other “right-click” actions) a power user feature, rather than a default. So the decided to make it make sense for all of the machines that had always shipped with one button mice, you could hold ctrl and then click an item and you’d get the context menu. For decades now, they support right click, but if you built up years of muscle memory around ctrl+clicking instead, you still can.
like press the meta key
You like the meta key? Probably better thank Apple. Apple has had a “meta” key basically forever, only it’s been called “command.” I’m old enough to remember when more manufacturers started to add their own meta keys. If you go grab an older keyboard, you’ll probably find they also have a “context menu” button, which is basically a “right-click” and you almost def won’t find one now.
you want to do basic window manager things
Lots of people in this thread seem to really, really like being able to window snap, which I kind of get but also generally disagree with. macOS (again, going back a thousand years) has a different philosophy when it comes to managing windows. On [MS] Windows, pretty much all software aims for full screen, and users def do the same. Window snapping now means you have a convenient way to see 2 whole things. If you really, really want window snapping similar to how MS does it, there are a hojillion ways to accomplish this with very simple app installs. macOS has instead tried to make it so that you can manage multiple apps/windows easily without full screen, going back to tiny, tiny screens.
But let’s talk about “basic window manager things” for a sec. Windows has easily, and I mean easily had the worst window management generally for like 2 decades. Windows 10 and Windows 11 help catch up to things I switched off of Windows and to Linux for in like, 2004. Expose, or “Task View” as it’s now called in Windows started in macOS, and was adopted in Linux in the mid 2000’s. Not until Windows 10, and not even the first version, do we get that. Ditto for virtual desktops. In Windows, I can press alt-tab and switch between any open app. In macOS, I can press cmd+tab and switch between any open app, but I can also press cmd-` and switch between an app’s windows. In Windows, I can minimize windows to the task bar just as I can in macOS. However, I can also just choose to hide all app windows, or hide all windows except the app I’m looking at. And on macOS, I can use hot corners (which Windows barely touches with its “show desktop” hotcorner, sort of) which I can configure however I want. I can throw my mouse in any corner of the screen and get more “basic window manager things” than exist on Windows.
Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device
If you have one the bad butterfly keyboards, yes. If not, this is nonsense. All laptop keyboards are bad, mac versions (with the very large caveat that the butterfly keyboards were insanely stupid/bad) are generally better.
I get that it’s a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that’s purely because it’s an extremely optimized ARM based processor that’s only designed to work with this specific operating system.
How is this supposed to be a negative? If we zoom out a little, this comment might as well be “oh sure, you can get your fancy graphic effects when you use a, what did you call it? graphics processing unit?” And even then, this is still not really accurately understanding why Apple has absolutely dominated CPU in mobile, and then is crushing in the class of laptop/desktop processors it competes in.**
But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point.
Aside from darwin, the kernel macOS runs on, Webkit, the browser engine that Chrome forked from, or passkeys, the thing that might replace passwords, you’re still really wrong.
Beyond those complaints, it’s got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat.
How about screens? Trackpad? Physical material, etc?
I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc.
“I can get vastly less done, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable the entire time.”
I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it’s the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.
Lots of misunderstanding here, but I’m already a phone book in.
* really, they probably never would have added right clicks, but as more software adopted right click actions, especially cross platform stuff like Adobe software, they pretty much had to.
** they’ve basically ceded the extreme high end. If you really want the most performant CPU and power\heat aren’t a concern, it’s not Apple.
Obviously, to ruin the world and complete his turn into a Bond villain, he needed to tank the 5th most popular social media site, which has been proven over and over to have less influence than anyone thinks.
We’re literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is “YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services.” Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it’s just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.
And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.
And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.
And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.