Selfhosted services like Nextcloud/Immich aren’t nearly as dependent on a critical user mass like Discord/Matrix, but the principle is the same.

If you host for family or friends, they may even use it if you convince them to switch. But when the setup, which doesn’t consist of redundant instances and isn’t maintained by a small army of SysAdmins 24/7, inevitably breaks for longer than a few minutes, most will switch back to the easy, reliable option.

I’d love to be able to disagree in any of your points, but I can’t.

The vast majority of users want something that simply works, is polished and intuitively usable. Reading docs, remembering anything other than the bare minimum, running into issues that don’t get magically resolved within 5 minutes will turn them away forever.

Even people with a technical background will at least partially compromise and migrate towards the services with the most users to not isolate themselfs.

Matrix is neat, Lemmy is neat, Nextcloud is neat (well, in theory), Immich is neat, so many other privacy friendly solutions are neat. But they’ll always be irrelevant in the global context.

Signal and DeltaChat, as well as Simplex and some others e2e communication solutions, are adequate from a technical point of view.

The main issue is always adoption. You can have the most convenient way to safely communicate with people, it’ll be useless if nobody you’re talking to wants to use it.

So, since Signal is very easy to set up and use as well as the most adopted, it’s currently the best pick for regular conversations.

Sweet, now I get to put “worked with NASA” in my résumé.

Their issue tracker is probably the best bet.

I never use dubious sources like this, especially banking apps.

Oh yeah, it’s usually a very bad idea, especially regarding apps handling sensitive information. Since my use case for APKMirror strictly consists of apps without internet permission in a dedicated, otherwise empty profile, the risk is acceptable.

I’m a bit disappointed with the hypocrisy of some commenters here.

So many very questionable articles, posts and statements that can’t be verified regarding IDF crimes get treated as the absolute truth. Yet a statement regarding a fake story, verified by Hamas and Al Jazeera, gets reported and isn’t trustworthy, since it’s from an institution aligned with Israel?

Holy echo chamber, batman.

open from a direct link from the Play store (in which the app page opens, however, with almost no information, such as version, permissions, size and so on, and the download doesn’t start.

Tested this myself, as that used to be the workaround for apps not appearing, but I’m facing the same issue on some apps. For the time being, installing/updating manually via APKMirror isn’t ideal, but I’m not installing the Play Store.

Yikes. This has the potential to seriously damage the reputation of Mozilla. I guess there are 3 possibilities:

• Onerep isn’t actually shady, but partnering with a company part of a conglomerate with companies directly opposing the stated goal isn’t a good look either way
• Onerep is shady and Mozilla failed to conduct the necessary research before partnering with them
• Onerep is shady and Mozilla knew

In any case: Personally, I’ll never not be grateful towards Mozilla for continuing to support and develop Firefox, which is quite literally the only relevant engine standing against the monopoly of chromium and all the bad that entails. But I trust other companies/initiatives/projects more when it comes to services other than the browser engine.

I’d support removing the post.

CEPA receives funding from various donors, including major technology companies such as Google and Amazon Web Services and key players in the defense industry like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems. While they list supporters, CEPA doesn’t disclose specific financial amounts. This lack of transparency among think tanks raises concerns about potential biases in their research and publications.

Gaming on Linux has come a long way and I always prefer to run it on Linux rather than a dedicated Windows boot, if possible.

But if you rely on VRR, DLSS and have a decent HDR display, Linux unfortunately still isn’t quite there yet. VRR/HDR is mostly unsupported systemwide currently. DLSS sometimes works, sometimes requires a lot of debugging and ends up actually hurting the performance.

If your hardware setup allows you to run your games at a decent framerate without DLSS/VRR, this likely won’t be an issue for you.

43% of Linux Gamers are Steam Deck users, most popular Nvidia GPU for linux (steam) gamers still is the 1060 while the most popular Desktop GPU still is the AMD RX 480.

Yes, but in fairness: The same is true for iOS or GrapeneOS, though that’s for valid reasons.

As much as I’d like to use a Linux phone, it’s simply not feasible for almost everybody at the moment.

What do people user their phone for?

• Private conversations
• Banking
• All kind of apps

Linux phones, at the moment, are way behind Android/iOS in terms of security and, since privacy requires security, also in privacy.

Even stock Android has so many more security features, that it’s not even close. Verified boot, exploit mitigation, (working) app sandboxing and so on. Not even speaking of specialized projects like GrapheneOS.

Even if the app ecosystem was there and the OS mature, I’d never run my banking through a Linux phone at the moment.

People really underestimate the psychological impact of something as seemingly annoying at best as a bug infestation.

I’ve encountered bedbugs over 10 years ago on holiday, luckily didn’t bring them home. After all this time, the first thing I think about when something itches in bed: Bedbugs.

It’s gonna be interesting to see what the reparations from Russia will look like. Can’t be too low to set an example, can’t be too high to prevent the population from pulling a Nazi Germany due to having no perspective.

I’m very curious about the future of European military development.

Until now, a lot of decisions regarding the financing of our armed forces and the development/production of necessary equipment seems to have been held back heavily by the unpopularity of spending money on something not (yet) directly affecting the population, similar to developments regarding climate change.

I do hope that we, as Europe and the countries therein, will swallow that pill to prepare for something that will hopefully never happen rather than start scrambling once it is too late.

Some sort of user-controllable merging of community views would honestly alleviate most of this:

Adding something like user-specific topics, e.g. allowing the user to consolidate all posts from instanceA.communityA and instanceB.communityA and even instanceA.communityB into a custom community view shouldn’t be all that difficult to implement (he stated naively, having never looked at the codebase).

A great addition would also be to allow the merging of posts, e.g. show all comments of all threads under one post where the post URL matches and/or the title matches.

This isn’t exact, since multiple communities can discuss the same topic from completely opposite viewpoints, but at least allowing the user to consolidate stuff and control it would be huge.

I know that it’s a core design feature of Lemmy and the underlying federation, but it’s pretty annoying that multiple communities with the same name can exist on different instances while not necessarily following the same ruleset or even purpose.

The small user base gets even more fractured that way, a lot of posts get reposted to multiple instances as well.

So you either:

• subscribe to one or two communities and miss a lot of potentially interesting conversations
• subscribe to more communities and get flooded with reposts and potentially stuff you don’t want to see due to a different ruleset