Secret Music

The Hop Harrigan 1946 serial and the Congo Bill 1948 serial. I found a Hop Harrigan torrent that sat at 0% on my list without even downloading metadata for about two years before I gave up. And I couldn’t find Congo Bill anywhere. Something tells me that Congo Bill would be pretty problematic and full of insulting stereotypes these days though.

The problem is that most of the ‘spam’ comes from official things like websites that you’ve signed up to and didn’t realise would also include dumb fkn emails periodically. And they don’t always do it right away either. I’ve had emails suddenly start arriving from somewhere that I signed up to like a year before.

Personally, my spam mitigation is to have one email address for signing up to shit with. Then these assholes can email me until they’re blue in the face and I don’t care because the only time I ever visit that inbox is for verification. And then I have another email address for personal use that never gets used because who uses email for personal use these days?

In conclusion. Email is for signing up to things and collecting trash that I’ll never look at.

Wasn’t the ex reality TV star who became president and put a news reader in charge of the military and anti-vaxxer in charge of healthcare, just talking about and glorifying meritocracies the other day? I thought these people were so against DEI because they care that much about having the right person for the job?

Yeah, every time I see people saying that they like the amount of users now just makes me think “hmmm must be nice that all of your particular niches and tastes are accounted for”. It’s pretty silly to be so anti growth for this place anyway. Even on Reddit, you literally have a choice to take part in the bigger ‘default’ subs or find a smaller one if that suits you. And I like choice.

This place still has a long way to go IMO. I’m starting to resort to lurking chat / ask style communities more just for something to do around here and even there, it’s not quite as engaging or active as it should be. As a humble user, sometimes I don’t have something particular in mind that I want to see. Sometimes I just want to bed rot and scroll and read people’s stories and discussions, maybe give my two cents if I feel so inclined. And there isn’t really that here yet because once you’ve checked AskLemmy or whatever, you’ve already seen 90% of the content for the next week.

Just to add for information’s sake, it works the other way around too. As in, you can use Fennec instead of Firefox Android and still sync with standard Firefox on desktop. Or Librewolf or whatever. I think most forks probably use the same sync functionality and servers as vanilla Firefox.

I definitely understand the aversion to algorithms because just look at what platforms like Facebook, Twitter or even Reddit these days do with them. In the wrong hands, it’s deceptive and dodgy as fuck.

But I wouldn’t be opposed to an algorithm that you can tailor yourself. And I don’t mean Bluesky style ‘tailoring’, I mean give us a list of interests and categories to toggle that then have more weight in the feed. So for example, if you like metal, you would then see more metal related stuff in your feed and not have it downed out by Taylor Swift and Kanye West because upvotes.

And something I picked up from Facebook (even though it doesn’t work for shit on Facebook because their algorithm is mentally handicapped) is being able to ‘favourite’ something. And by doing that, not just pinning it to the top of the list of communities but actually making it appear in your feed more whether the upvotes are a high amount or not.

won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up

Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:

• I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.

• By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.

• Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.

• Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.

• I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.

• Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.

I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.

I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.

I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.

Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.

And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.

Literally the opposite.

After the French Revolution, parliament was arranged so that the people who supported democracy and freedom literally sat on the left hand side; and all of the freeloading, self serving, bootlicking monarchists that wanted to return to rule by a king or queen sat on the right hand side.

Far right are that but more extreme. They don’t just lick boots but also the assholes of the politicians and billionaires that they worship like gods.

In the '80s and '90s, everything these people didn’t like was ‘satanic’. Then that nonsense seemed to disappear for about a decade. Until those people returned with updated terminology that makes them look like ‘free speech’ warriors to all the kids and not the dogmatic psychos that they are.

So since then we’ve gone from SJW to woke to now DEI. But it’s always been the same fucking people, or types of people, that told me that all the cartoons I watch and music I listen to was ‘evil’ and ‘satanic’ when I was a kid.

I actually almost fell for the SJW thing myself back in the day. I was circling that drain. Until I opened my eyes and saw the company that I was in. Since then I’ve been borderline ‘SJW’ myself because fuck those people.

One thing at least is that when you search “Reddit alternatives”, most articles that I came across seemed to make out like Lemmy is the best option in terms of amount of users and not being advertised explicitly as a “free speech and censorship free platform”, which we all know really means “bigots are welcome here.” In fact when I was searching Reddit alternatives, it seemed to me that Lemmy is really the only option.

can’t function in society where random individuals can freely reject their statements, so they need the internet to hide away from life.

Show me where in real life are random individuals able to interrupt your conversations with friends and like-minded people without being told to fuck off or punched in the face? People like you keep peddling this idea that we’re all supposed to ‘meet in the middle’ at all times with bigots that think we don’t deserve human rights, or else we’re the bad ones. Fuck off, what does the ‘middle’ of respecting rights or not respecting rights even look like. And real life doesn’t fucking work like that anyway.

I would not hang out with inbred supremacist ‘alpha’ fucking idiots even if you paid me. And I would not welcome them into my home or my social circles. You’re free to speak but that doesn’t mean that I have to fucking listen.

shifted to the point where a double Sieg Heil at your president’s inauguration is within normal discourse

Haha thank you. I’m not even American but to me it’s pretty shocking to find out that this place, world of all instances, is too ‘extreme’ for people. Maybe I really am a dirty radical but I think that if people who consider themselves democrats are still fucking clutching their pearls about the left wing being too left wing while Elon Musk does open nazi salutes and trans people get their rights and dignity stripped away, then it’s no wonder the USA is so fucked.

You guys clearly need a new political party because your choices are overt right wingers, or spineless right wingers that like to pretend they represent the left.

Edit: maybe the bad men will see the light if we all hold hands and sing kumbaya. I’m sure that all of the people who are already finding themselves victims to this will thank you for taking the high road and not scaring too many centrists.

LineageOS 20 on the Nokia 4.2. The only option for this phone besides LineageOS 19 and it’s one of these cases where the dev just stopped updating anything and deleted their XDA profile. Might go back to vanilla but the problem is that’s a downgrade in Android version too.

This whole phone is a regret. My previous phone had just died unexpectedly and it was a spur of the moment purchase with a low budget, based on nostalgia for a ‘Nokia’ that doesn’t actually exist anymore. Should’ve just gone for a cheap Samsung and I probably would’ve at least had more choice in custom firmwares.

About bloody time. Containers are fine for on the fly use - for checking what pages look like logged out, or visiting a link that you don’t want affecting algorithms etc. but for separating personal and work and whatever else, profiles are the way to go. It’s actually already pretty easy to add ‘about:profiles’ to the toolbar but the more accessible they make it, the better.

I look forward to profiles also making it to the Android app 5 to 10 years from now.

We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.

And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.

Apologies for the second reply. Just wanted to say that I checked out mbin and it’s probably more up my alley personally.

But, I still have a barely used Facebook account because a lot of people in my country are still on it. And I’m going to see if the rumours are true and try to spread the news about Friendica there, hopefully without my post getting removed or account being banned.

And if / when people from there give Friendica a shot, then I’ll give it a proper shot too with them. It’ll just be used for different things than what I use Lemmy for.

Basically I would be spending much more time in Lemmy communities, and I thought Friendica could be something extra on top to supplement it.

So I would like to be able to browse instances and communities and choose what I want to see and participate in. Either by subscribing or curating a feed or two. I don’t see an obvious way to do this from Friendica yet. It seems like here I need to scroll through a pre existing feed and curate it from there.

But please bear in mind, I haven’t explored extensively yet or read the link you shared earlier, although I have saved that post so that I can get back to it later in my day.

And another small thing for me (that can be easily fixed by styles and apps) is no apparent dark mode.

Made a quick account there to check things out and not sure if it’s entirely the right fit for the particular use case I had in mind. It’s very much inspired by Facebook obviously, which I was expecting but from what I can tell from a quick look, not the kind of Lemmy integration I was hoping for or imagining.

I’m going to keep an eye on this place though, so that I can start encouraging friends and family to join once it’s easy and attractive (in terms of content) for anyone to join.

Maybe I should ask here. The reason I’m here is because I’m looking for answers to this. As far as the integration with Lemmy goes, how does it work? Is there a ‘Friendica’ instance that anyone using that platform would be posting and interacting from? And in that case, does it play nicely with the other instances?

I’m pretty new here, probably moving to another instance at some point anyway. And I’ve been thinking of looking into these multi purpose platforms that play nicely with others. Because why not have more features and tools to play with, even if I don’t use half of them. It might also fill in nicely for features that are missing here like multicommunities and posting to your own profile.

Also heard of mbin, although an in app search for something like “mbin” seems pretty useless here.

I hear your point but also it might be a mostly first world thing. So kinda like comparing local country music artists to Michael Jackson. Maybe other 3rd world denizens can chip in but here (so this is purely anecdotal) but in my corner of the world, we watched movies and series and played games and shit like we would’ve pre social media.

Personally I’m not even sure what Tiger King is (and not that interested in finding out either, if I’m being honest) and if I go outside and ask around here, I’m not sure how many answers I would get. Possibly I’d get an answer once school is out and kids are around, I guess.

Edit: just to add, I hope this doesn’t go the same way as the time I was trying to explain to Americans that the NBA really isn’t this global phenomenon in every household and that John Cena is probably more famous here.