Ah, yeah that’s a yikes

I’m not too worried at the moment. Lemmy is much newer and smaller than the social networks we’re all used to, as well as being an open source social network. It makes a lot of sense that this site attracts a lot of like-minded people to it. Hopefully as more people join, we’ll see more open (respectful) discussion.

On the flipside, the more people join Lemmy, the bigger of a target it’ll be for bot farms and zone-flooding shenanigans, so maybe its smaller size and appeal to specific kinds of people isn’t the worst thing in the world either?

I always heard about Spotify ripping off artists and thought “well, it can’t be worse than YouTube’s random demonetisations, can it?” but what’s this about it shilling for ICE?

I think the first place I stopped using was Amazon way back in COVID times or earlier! I don’t think there was any specific thing they did, there just wasn’t anything they had that eBay, Onbuy or Argos didn’t have, and I don’t like to support monopolies if I can avoid it. In retrospect I’m very glad I stopped using it!

A couple of years after that I stopped using Google and changed to Mojeek and Qwant, when I heard that decent Google alternatives existed.

A few years later came Xitter. I sort of got peer-pressured into getting Twitter back in the day, I used it as an art dump, and didn’t really feel any personal connection to it, so I didn’t really feel bad about deleting it the exact day Musk bought it.

In the last year or so I’ve started to get serious about alternative tech. After working with Linux for about two years, I finally installed Ubuntu when Windows 10 became end of life last year, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, I deleted Reddit, and I deleted Whatsapp all within a couple of months of each other!

A few days ago my phone broke, which gave me the perfect opportunity to order a Fairphone (Linux) phone instead of using Android! I’m really proud of this one, because 99% of phones are specifically made to only run with one operating system, either Android or iOS. That means you can’t just install Linux on any phone the way you can with desktops and laptops, making transitioning into a Linux phone way more expensive.

The main thing I can’t seem to shake is YouTube, but even that’s been significantly cut down in favour of watching Peertube and my DVD collection!

Obviously it depends on what you buy from there, but personally I find Amazon one of the easiest places to avoid, and one of the first places I’ve started avoiding. I’ve just been substituting it with eBay and Onbuy, and so far there’s nothing Amazon has that they don’t.

Yeah, in theory I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as a term of phrase, I just think that in practice there are so many people saying it who I wouldn’t trust to pinpoint societal problems

You might recognise a soyjak if you see one, even if you wouldn’t know the name of them. It was based off another meme (wojaks) and took off alongside the COVID-era conspiracy theories. It’s actually interesting that you can notice how the early ones just had a couple of nerdy traits, like a Nintendo Switch, some glasses, and some facial hair, but as it became less of a meme and more of a propaganda technique, they had to become uglier and uglier to clarify that they represented the “wrong opinion”

For me it’s the term “that’s what’s wrong with society” and variations of it. There are a LOT of things wrong with society, and different countries, cities and regions have totally different problems. If you boil all these problems down to one thing, it’s probably because you’re obsessed with that one thing, not because it’s actually caused all these other problems.

I view it as the right wing equivalent of a soyjak. A derogatory name (and drawing) for someone who’s terminally online and politically obsessed.

The Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared TV show!

Casette Beasts, a Creature collecting (pokemon like) game, is by a UK studio, and Yooka Replaylee which is also British only released last year and I still think it’s the most slept-on game of 2025!

Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally

So in other words, if you only use Discord as a messaging app and for small servers between friends, this won’t affect you?

I honestly have no idea why Discord started trying to push itself as some normal social media like Facebook, and why people started treating it as such. Discord was a glorified telephone line with gifs and web links. I don’t need some manufactured sense of “community” among thousands of people who happen to watch the same YouTuber as me.

I got banned from one of their communities for criticising the Chinese government. Yeah, I feel like all big .ml communities should be blocked as an indivisible part of the process of setting up a Lemmy account.

Yeah lol. That and wanting to lash out because he’s mad Europe called him out on his Greenland threat

And when the European finally closed his YouTube account, he wept, for there were no more US products left to boycott

The Chagos deal was going to be Starmer’s favour to Trump. The UK was going to pay to keep using it, just to host the US base there. It was essentially another conservative mess for Labour to clean up, and another example of Trump having a strop about something that he had previously been in favour of. I say go ahead and pull it: this is the perfect opportunity to have another bill and keep the US out of this one.

I migrated to Ubuntu from Windows 10 when it became end-of-life last year. I had a major head start beforehand because my work allowed me to dabble in Linux for a good 2 years beforehand, though! It’s been great! Pretty much everything that you “can’t do” on Windows has some sort of open source alternative. Can’t have Microsoft Office on Linux? Download Libreoffice for free! Can’t have Adobe Creative Cloud? Just download Krita and Kdenlive for free! Can’t have Microsoft Edge? What on earth do you want it for?? You don’t really need to use the terminal for most things, but it can make a lot of things much easier and quicker if/when you do get your head round it.

The only notable weak point is a few specific online videogames. Valve Anti Cheat really doesn’t play well with Linux (which is really dumb because Valve are so well known for supporting Linux). I’ve managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 playing online using “Steam Runtime 1.0 (scout)” but I haven’t found anything that works for Team Fortress 2. That being said, most other online games like Bloons TD6 and Worms WMD work perfectly natively, 90% of games released last year were natively Linux compatible, and the CEO of GOG said they’d like to support Linux more too, so even this is an improving situation!

Removed by mod

I have something of a game going on where every time the US peeves me off, I delete something that profits them.

Trump threatens Greenland? I delete Deviantart

Trump threatens Canada? I delete Reddit

The ICE shooting? I delete Instagram

After hearing about this I just deleted Brave Mobile and switched to Vivaldi. If it stays this consistent I’m going to have to save up for an Ubuntu Touch phone.