Heyo! Just another random who’s moving over from centralized social media to the Fediverse. Mastodon wasn’t too bad but I love anything like Reddit!

Games, anime, Japanese, food, and music are my loves. Fanfic beats food tho, I can read for hours instead!

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2025

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  • I started using a VPN after my friends/classmates told me about them in my Sophomore year of HS, mostly to get around the Wifi banning us from accessing certain apps (social media). Now, like all the other dumb kids, I used whatever they recommended, which was some shitty “Free” VPN that was probably stalking my data. But by Senior year, I smartened up and learned about online privacy and got myself a Proton VPN subscription after using the free version for a bit.

    So yeah, I could totally believe middle-school and up are using VPNs, cause that’s what we literally did.


  • Starting this by saying: Using tracking apps to see what someone’s doing 24/7 or worrying about them cheating is insane and is a solid NO, full stop.

    But I do understand why people use tracking apps, and I wish we had good FOSS alternatives. A tracking/location sharing app where the trackee can turn it on/off anytime they want (after using a password/biometrics, to prevent others from messing with it), so loved ones can be sure you made it to your destination.

    I don’t want people stalking their kids, judging their friends for the places they go, surveiling if someone’s a cheater, or worst of all, having their data be sold by the shitty companies that run these services.

    I’ve read stories that have scared me and made me wish I could do something like that when I’m out late. I had to (unfortunately) use Live360 during a field trip in another country cause the teachers needed to keep track of us. I understand safety-wise that these apps are vital


  • Media codecs and formats

    Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.

    Driver availability

    Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.

    I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.


  • “It just works” only works for very basic normie stuff.

    I think that was @Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world’s main point. Apple is great if you’re a normie, but if you even think about tinkering with things, have an unusual issue on your system, or creatures forbid… want to play games, you’re fucked.

    My mom is an Apple diehard who has used Android and Windows in the past (2000s), but got burned by Window’s shitty security and really only switched to iPhone due to iMessage being more reliable than SMS at the time. She knows a little bit of tech stuff (I guess I get it from her), but overall, she’s a “normie” compared to me, so Apple (90% of the time) does what she needs.

    It simplifies a lot of things

    If this was me about 3 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have debated this as hard. But recently my grandma had to call my mom and I to help her get her iPhone pictures to work on her Windows laptop, and she almost thought she downloaded a virus when trying to get an HEIC app. Apple’s asinine proprietary file format is a plague on society, and I hated when I had to send pictures from my iPhone to my Google drive for school in HS. That’s not simple, and now we have to help grandparents understand that they need to screenshot their camera pictures or else literally no website will take their damn photos.

    The little things add-up for me, and so yeah, it’s nice having something that “just works”, but only if you literally accept everything and never complain about any of their choices.


  • I recently decided to switch from using Atomic Fedora to reg KDE Fedora (cause tinkering and bypassing atomic features got on my nerves), and I almost went through with wiping everything and only having Linux installed. And then I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to do some tests for college cause they use anti-cheating software (lockdown browser) which they probably wouldn’t like if I ran it in a VM or wine…

    But man, once I’m out of college, I’m probably wiping Windows for good! Also gonna factory reset that partition so it at least takes way less space on my drive.

    (Side note: the other hesitation is that I’m 90% kernel updates nuked Bluetooth for me around March (It worked when I rolled back to January/February releases) and I do have zoom classes sometimes. Like, do I just have to buy a Bluetooth dongle to deal with this?)



  • No, she absolutely hates right-wing content and is definitely left. Asmongold is a grifter piece of shit human being who attracts alt-right viewers. It’s not about her not being interested, she quite literally gets upset at the awful ideas and hate that those channels spread and doesn’t want to see them. She never watches their videos on purpose, she’s only ever clicked on them by accident, she always either clicks away immediately or dislikes the video, and never comments on them. She has repeatedly tried to block those channels. YT continues to show them.


  • I block content I’m not interested in and it goes away.

    I agree with this idea, but unfortunately YT and other engagement social media sites don’t want that to happen. For me, I’m almost never shown videos I hate, but when I say “not interested/don’t show me this channel” it USUALLY works. Not at the time though. I’ve definitely gotten channels recommended to me that I already said I don’t want to see.

    This is especially true for my mom, who is frequently getting upset by the fact that YT keeps showing her Fox News and Asmongold clips in her recommendations. I think changing the VPN to Canada helped to reduce the Fox News recommendations, but the Asmongold clips can’t be escaped.









  • I definitely plan to used RAID for my drives.

    To follow 3-2-1, have the working copy, a copy on a SD, and a copy on cloud (encrypted of course). Depending on the size of the snapshot it will go to Proton or Google Drive (Sticking to Google is silly, I know, but I don’t have a second location to have secure my data lol). 2 is met by having it on SD and Cloud. 1 is met by saving encrypted snapshot on cloud.


  • Loops is still in beta, so there’s no other instances yet, but it’s gonna use ActivityPub like everyone else does so it can federate with Pixelfed (and probs mastodon). Also, like 90% of Fediverse instances require registration, usually to prevent spam and other crazy shit (CSAM, literal gore, etc.) from being posted. Just gonna have to wait a bit.