I thought I was jovially expressing confusion but that clearly didn’t come across (and admittedly re-reading it, I agree, I misjudged the tone, it’s not my best comment).

I really didn’t realise that anyone actually liked infinite scrolling and hoped that somebody would explain it to me.

That wasn’t my intention.

Why would anyone want that? I always thought that was just an addiction trap for commercial sites to trick you in to browsing for longer - we’ve broken free from that kind of BS here haven’t we?

Is that a loophole though? I don’t really like tomato sauce on my pasta anyway, I’m not replacing tomato sauce on my pasta with anything new, I’m just making how I like it anyway, access to tomato sauce is irrelevant.

Can I make a non-tomato sauce?

Well I certainly wouldn’t use it if it wasn’t for social pressure, it’s the main way most of the people I know communicate and has been for 5+ years. I don’t have a facebook account or need one to use it, so I wouldn’t call it facebook.

Maybe it’s a US vs Europe thing but as a European, most messaging (for better or worse, probably worse since it’s Meta) is done via whatsapp, where messages appear the same for iPhone and Android users, if somebody messages me through SMS I’d probably think it was a scam or they’re really old, no-one I know uses SMS anymore.

OK, I have to say I really don’t get you now. You first said you weren’t aware of the federated nature of email and alternatives to Gmail so you were helped out here, now you say you were already familiar with and opinionated about Proton suite.

I don’t think of it as a selfie camera, I think of it as a camera for video calls.

I use kbin so I might be wrong, but you do [email protected], so [email protected], becomes !nostupidquestions

Hmm, maybe that’s not entirely working for KBin because your “!” link links me to https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions as opposed to through my home instance.

The Link Fixer bot got it right.

I took that as an example, I’m not necessarily endorsing it as the best solution. I personally use the free package.

The bundle with VPN is what I was looking at; for full-featured email, VPN and 500 GB cloud storage from a provider with a good track record doesn’t sound bad if you don’t mind putting those eggs in one basket.

Having companies involved isn’t bad as long as there’s enough choice. There are such a huge number of email providers I think there’ll always be alternatives if one turns bad - respectfully I don’t think your fears are realistic.

Also, paying isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for example Protonmail’s paid options I think are quite reasonable for what you get and it keeps it private and ad-free, it’s a fair deal. I don’t think free providers will ever go anywhere but there is the choice.

Well a few minutes ago you were believing that email was owned by Google, surely this is good news to you on balance, right?

Or just use one of the many other email providers.

Lemmy seems to be more established than KBin with more instances, also additional features of KBin don’t really appeal to me - but as a Lemmy user I interact with KBin quite a lot, so in that respect I feel like more of a citizen of the fidiverse than of just Lemmy.

I’ve never heard of Tildes in my life.

Fair enough, I wondered if there was a way to make a user appear as a community somehow but I’ve never found it.

How does it work the other way round? If I wanted to follow someone on Mastodon from Lemmy, can I do that?

Often you’ll get people just writing GA which is ambiguous since it could equally apply to Gabon (Africa) or other places. A bit of a pet peeve of mine. It’s a good habit, in my opinion, to always prefix the country code.

I just want to compliment your use of ISO 3166-2

I’m sure it’s growing pains. When it works it seems to be the best way of sorting things, but after a while it seems to give you new, relevant stuff interlaced with really old irrelevant stuff.

You say “to be fair” but with full respect I don’t think there’s a fairer way to put it than how I described it as “technically FOSS”. The source is free but does it work to provide freedom to users?

OK, but what if Meta’s instance, due to their vast marketing power, becomes an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the fediverse (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable fear); some instances start federating with it justifying that it brings you both worlds, it becomes an increasingly hard-sell to join those instances not federating with it and they became very niche or die out. Consider how Android started out as a nice neutral FOSS project and, while still technically FOSS, once Google became dominant it became Google spyware.

Well I think we’re just about to see, since Meta are about to try something funny.

I fear that simply having all instances agreeing to not federate with Meta won’t be enough, we need something stronger to shut them out, something analogous to copyleft that could enforce a level of openness - but I don’t think we have that. I really hope I’m wrong, I really hope Meta fail with all of their endeavours, but it is a worry.

It wasn’t a problem for forums, for smaller interests there’ll be fewer forums, it’ll sort itself out.

Yes, it’s a great thing.

In the old days of forums there were multiple forums for popular topics, so if you didn’t like one or didn’t agree with how it was moderated you had many more to choose from. It was usually friendly and you got to know all the regulars in a forum.

Next we had centralisation which lead to massive forums, resentment built up against moderators, everyone was faceless and had no sense of community, and it all basically turned in to a competition for attention.

Now we have decentralisation, we can have lots of manageable size communities again - it’s great.

It’s heaven in a can!

There are bugs but they are getting fewer by the day, I don’t think I’ve had the fast scroll thing for a few days now. But that’s not relevant for me, I have no interest in using my phone so it’s either live with the bugs of the web version or don’t do it at all.

I’m firmly a desktop user here, I’m old-fashioned, I don’t like using my phone, I’d rather be doing just about anything else than reading and typing on a phone screen. But each to their own!

If someone wants to make a desktop app I’d be interested (there never was one for Reddit), but the browser experience is just fine - especially with version 0.18 it’s starting to feel polished.