In case it helps you understand: barriers of entry to Mastodon, from my perspective as an ex-Twitter user and current Bluesky and Mastodon user (note it took me 4 tries over 5 years to actually “enjoy” Mastodon)

• Lack of content discoverability: Bluesky has programmable feeds and starter packs (although the latter is pretty flawed), Twitter has The Algorithm. When you first create a Mastodon account, you’re not given much.
  • The primary reason Mastodon “stuck” with me on the 4th go around was this. I manually imported a bunch of my connections from Bluesky.
• Choosing the right server: on all my previous attempts, I was overwhelmed by server selection and went with generic all-purpose instances. Having a local timeline with things that might actually interest you is very helpful.
• The network effect: I don’t think I really have to elaborate on this one

Bonus things that probably don’t serve as barriers to entry but are real issues for active users:

• Lack of features: it’s not possible to search for posts on ActivityPub at any reasonable scale. I don’t know all my Mastodon lore and think I’ve heard that search was intentionally not made good in the past for privacy or something, but if you’re posting something on the “blast my posts everywhere” protocol, well… it’s still out there.
  • There’s also no quote posts, which haven’t been implemented for similar privacy/anti-harassment reasons. But instead, other software like Pleroma works around this by simply giving a link to the original post—the worst of both worlds, bad UX and not even an option to attempt to detach or prevent quotes.
• Fedi meta / sudden defederations: If you picked the wrong server—or any of your friends did—and you end up with a tempermental admin, you could unexpectedly lose contact with each other due to defederation, and you might not even notice.

This is not to say other platforms are perfect. There are plenty of things I don’t like about Bluesky. This comment is specifically about Mastodon.

Distilled versions of Deepseek are available that can be ran on consumer-grade GPUs, and I have done this myself. I’ve even ran a really small one on my phone, though obviously at that scale it’s going to be slow and bad lol

Hadn’t heard of pikvm before. Will keep that in mind, thanks!

While you didn’t name names of what app you were using for streaming, I just got into a similar situation with my dorm and what I found worked was using wired ALVR for my streaming. Not wireless, but good, long right-angled USB-C cables don’t cost a fortune. https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/wiki/ALVR-wired-setup-(ALVR-over-USB)

I’m at college right now, which is a 3 hour drive away from my home, where a server of mine is. I just have to ask my parents to turn it back on when the power goes out or it gets borked. I access it solely through RustDesk and Cloudflare Tunnels SSH (it’s actually pretty cool, they have a web interface for it).

I have no car, so there’s really no way to access it in case something catastrophic happens. I have to rely on hopes, prayers, and the power of a probably outdated Pop!_OS install. Totally doesn’t stress me out I’ll just say I like to live on the edge :^)

What’s Reddit?

I don’t know the specifics behind why the limit is 72 bytes, but that might be slightly tricky. My understanding of bcrypt is that it generates 2^salt different possible hashes for the same password, and when you want to test an input you have to hash the password 2^salt times to see if any match. So computation times would get very big if you’re combining hashes

bcrypt has a maximum password length of 72 bytes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt#Maximum_password_length

While I do agree that this is bad, I’m a little confused—what does this have to do with dead internet theory? Doesn’t that relate to users being bots?

I’m sure a lot of forks will pop up right around this time. I’ll be less skeptical of them once I see actual commits made to the codebase instead of things like just changing the readme

I hate to be that guy, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything to this fork. At least a few links in the README don’t work, and the domain for the “email” is actively for sale. The owner of the repository doesn’t seem to have any real previous projects on their GitHub account.

I can understand that it’s a new fork, but in my mind you’d want to at least make sure the Readme is… passable before you spread the word and make a Patreon for the project.

EDIT: The Patreon link has been removed since I made this comment. I’m still incredibly skeptical of the project though

The brief explanation is that Nitter worked by creating “guest accounts”, which were a leftover from when you used to be able to use the Twitter mobile app without an account. After creation, these accounts lasted for a month. The time since the ability to create these accounts was removed is nearing (has reached?) a month

I think what was meant here is that it won’t run apps designed for the Oculus Quest lineup (which is based on Android), not the actual Facebook application

StreetComplete is Android only, but last I heard Go Map!! for iOS was trying to add a similar “quest” functionality to that found in SC.

It’s not exactly the same, but I can vouch for StreetComplete being an incredibly good/similar game. You walk around the real world, and the app points out missing data in OpenStreetMap that you can fill in easily. You get the dopamine of a number going up, help dethrone proprietary map dominamce, and get some good excercise in in the process.

I have an external monitor that runs at 144Hz, but a while ago I realized because it was connected over HDMI, it was limited to 60Hz (for some weird reason). So I bought a DisplayPort cable, and after plugging it in the screen was flickering/artifacting in some weird way that I haven’t seen it do on X11 or Windows with the same cable. So as a result I’ve had to reluctantly switched back to i3 for daily use

Yep, Nvidia gpu. At the time I bought it I wasn’t aware of their reputation for Linux support, and I bought my laptop from System76 (with Pop!_OS, because Nvidia drivers are more “just works” on it). I’ve had a fairly good experience with all of it, but the next computer I buy will definitely have an AMD GPU.

I think this is the first time I’ve been fully unable to get the dgpu working. Every other time it’s just worked or worked with tweaking

The first game mentioned was Bille Bust Up. I liked the demo that was off of Steam (and it ran fine using the proton-call command), so I subscribed to the developer’s Patreon (which gives a Steam key) and it wouldn’t use my dgpu.

The second game was A Hat in Time.

I love Linux. I have it installed on 3 machines, have been using it for over 3 years, and would install it right away if I ever got a new computer.

A couple weeks ago, I was feeling pretty exhausted and just wanted to play a game thru Proton on my laptop. I got it running, but it was unplayable because it was using my integrated GPU instead of my discrete one. I spent the night switching compositors, cables, and drivers, but none of it fixed the issue.

The next day, feeling exhausted from fruitless debugging, I tried to launch another game via Proton that I knew had worked in the past, but it crashed on launch. I spent the whole day going thru the same steps I did the day before, but also consulting ProtonDB and trying software that would force usage of the dgpu.

The next day, I installed Windows 10 to an external hard drive and spent the day debloating it. Drivers got installed automatically, I downloaded both games on Steam, and they just worked. So I guess I now dual-boot Windows just for the games that don’t work thru Proton. Loading game worlds and booting up take ~75% longer, but that’s to be expected because it’s running on a 4 year old HDD connected over a USB cable.

As mentioned earlier, I love Linux a lot, and if all games had native binaries or Proton worked 100% I’d format that god-forsaken hard drive. But when real life has got me down, I don’t need Linux to get me down further. I don’t like Windows, and I feel incredibly dirty whenever I press F7 on boot to get to Windows. But when my choices are “spend 8 hours on fruitless quest to get >2fps” and “press play button”, I’m going to take the path of least resistance.

What about ReVanced, NewPipe, or Grayjay?