Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.

• Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

• Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.

New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

There’s lem.el for Emacs.

There was another one but it doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

It usually implies it’s weird in an old-fasioned way though.

Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.

If you check “I’m an advanced user” in the settings, then hit the “More” button in the dropdown a few times it’ll show the more advanced interface that lets you choose which third party domains to allow. It doesn’t work quite the same since it blocks both content and scripts per site, but I find it good enough for my usage.

edit: You can technically block just scripts per 3rd party site, but it involves manually editing the content type for your rules in the settings. It’s not part of the main interface, so I never bother using it.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

GoToSocial is designed for small / single user instances. There’s more with similar goals like snac, seppo, pub, ktistec, tapir, shuttlecraft, activities.next, and microblog.pub, but I haven’t really looked into them so I’m not sure on the status of each. There’s a nice list of activitypub software at delightful fediverse apps if you want to look at more options.

Most philosophers think free will and determinism are compatible.

The creator of pixelfed is working on a tiktok alternative loops, although for now it’s in private beta.

For a starting point that is available now, you could look at Pixeldroid, an open source pixelfed app.

Besides the ones already mentioned:

• The FSF has some channels at https://framatube.org/a/fsf

• There’s a bunch of KDE related channels at https://tube.kockatoo.org

• Blender has several channels at https://video.blender.org

• https://peertube.touhoppai.moe/a/shichimi has Krita tutorials from the creator of the Pepper and Carrot webcomic.

• https://tilvids.com/a/martin_owens from someone who works on Inkscape.

• https://tilvids.com/a/togglejam looks at the science behind fictional games and shows.

• https://diode.zone/c/andrewtropin has a bunch of scheme and guix related videos

• There’s some anarchist channels on https://kolektiva.media like CrimethInc and subMedia.

A couple of gaming related accounts/channels:

• https://subscribeto.me/a/gbryant

• https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam

There’s also sepiasearch.org for PeerTube videos.

There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/

Thanks, I didn’t know about that. I looked into this a bit more and there’s actually a bunch of techniques, and shift right click only gets around some of them. There’s a tester tool at https://webbrowsertools.com/test-right-click/ with examples of blocking right clicks, text selection, and copying/pasting text.

It looks like a good extension, but I feel like my setup works better for my workflow. Tab groups with auto tab discard has a similar effect, and there’s an archive option for when I really want to unload the whole group.

Tab groups are really handy for multitasking if you use multiple desktops. I have a window open on each desktop, and switching between tab groups switches to the relevant desktop.

This question gets asked pretty often, so I’d been meaning to write something up for a while. Browser extensions were one of the first ways I got interested in free software, and there’s a lot of really useful ones out there.

If you want even more options, here’s some I have installed but disabled.

• Forcastfox (fix version) - Shows the weather.
• Gesturify - Control the browser with just mouse gestures. I don’t really use it because I try to use keyboard shortcuts, but it’s really handy if you use a mouse a lot.
• GNU LibreJS - Blocks any non-free javascript. This is not a easy or fun extension to use. I’ve got my one system set up to use only free software, with this enabled. It really shows you how much proprietary javascript you’re using.
• Picket Line Notifier - It tells you what products are from companies with ongoing strikes.
• Kiwix - Download offline sections of wikipedia, stackoverflow, khan academy and a bunch of other websites. They also have desktop and phone apps, so I don’t really use the browser extension.
• Buster: Captcha Solving for Humans - I love how there’s an add-on bot that can solve captchas to prove you’re a human.
• Allow Right Click - Turn this on when a website tries to block you from saving images.
• User Agent Switcher and Manager - Occasionally you find a site that doesn’t work in your browser, but just changing the user agent string often fixes it.

I use firefox, so I’m not positive if all of these are available for chromium based browsers.

Each extension varies in how big it is, so there isn’t an easy rule for how many extensions to use. Also, if you’re trying to increase privacy, many extensions can make your browser fingerprint more easily identifiable.

• uBlock Origin - I have it set to block everything by default like NoScript, whitelisting sites as I use them. I used to use uMatrix for this before it was discontinued, but this works well enough.

• Tridactyl - Advanced vim-like keybindings. It has more features than something like Vimium, but I’ve had it occasionally break sites so I had to change the noiframe settings listed on the troubleshooting page.

• Midnight Lizard - I’ve been using this lately instead of Dark Reader. It has much more customization, but I’ve occasionally had it mess up on some sites.

• CanvasBlocker - Sends out fake info to make your browser fingerprint different each time. This doesn’t fully prevent fingerprinting with how I have my add-ons set up, but it at least makes the job harder for trackers and gives them less real data.

• Local CDN - local copies of common libraries, so you don’t access a bunch of 3rd party sites to download javascript. This sends your data to fewer sites, but if you’re trying to stay anonymous it makes your fingerprint more unique.

• AutoTabDiscard - This unloads inactive tabs, which comes in handy if you have a ton of tabs open. You can disable it for any sites you always want to keep active. You can also tweak how many tabs to keep open and how long before it tries to discard them.

• Leechblock NG - Set time limits for how long you want to spend on each site. If you use it right it can help break addictions to certain websites.

• Stylus - I use it for a couple of sites that just have really terrible styles or don’t work well with dark mode.

• AutoFill Forms - Handy for if you have any repetitive forms you need to fill out.

• DownThemAll - I don’t use it often, but really useful when there’s a bunch of links to download.

• ViolentMonkey - Per site custom javascript. I don’t use this much, but occasionally comes in handy to make a website do what you want.

• Tab Reloader - for sites that you want to keep refreshed.

I’ve got a bunch for integration with various websites and software:

• Plasma Integration - This integrates stuff like video playback and notifications into KDE. Also needs a package installed to connect to. There’s also Gnome Shell Extension, which does a similar thing for for Gnome.
• Flatline - Install flatpaks more easily from flathub website. I usually avoid flatpaks, but it’s convenient for when I do.
• Mastodon Simplified Federation - More easily interact with other mastodon sites to forward to your server.
• SponsorBlock for YouTube - I really hate ads.
• Bypass Paywall Clean - This gets around paywalls for a bunch of news sites. It’s not on mozilla’s add-on page, so need to get it off gitlab.
• Pinboard Pin - for my bookmarks.
• BlueLiteBlocker - I rarely go on twitter, but blocking all the top replies with blue checkmarks makes it slightly less terrible.
• RedditEnhancementSuite - I don’t use reddit much lately, but when I do, this makes it more usable.
• moderator toolbox for reddit - mod tools for reddit
• TinEye - just adds a right click option for images to do reverse image search.

I’m pretty sure these are Firefox only, but I’ll leave them here for anyone else who’s interested.

• Simple Tab Groups - I like using this to organize my tabs into groups. There’s probably better ways to not have so many tabs open but it’s convenient to have a bunch of open tabs when I want them.

• Multi-Account Containers - Helpful if you have multiple accounts on the same site, or want to keep your cookies separate for different tasks.

• Firefox Translations - adds more language options to Firefox’s offline translation.

It hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years though. It uses a very old API so it’s slightly buggy.

I’ve been using Unexpected Keyboard lately instead. It’s the only modern keyboard I’ve found that has stuff like control and function keys. It uses swiping on keys to get more characters though, so it takes some getting used to. I had to set the swipe distance higher so I don’t have as many typos.

Most states in the US have separate lower minimum wages for tipped workers, with a federal minimum of $2.13/hour.

Schildichat for now. I like some stuff in Fluffychat better, but I find it’s a bit buggy.