Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.

This is why I can never get into microblogging/Twitter-type platforms. Character limits and one-click reposting mean that what little discourse you get is shallow, and ragebait is consistently pushed to the top.

I’m not going to say that Lemmy or (especially) Reddit completely avoid this, but you generally get much more insightful conversation and can opt-in to political communities.

There was a thread on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn’t a total shitshow!

I just archived all my Instagram posts and changed my bio to say I was done with the platform, “you can reach me through my website” and so on. Fuck that noise.

If Canada uses the same bands as the rest of NA (and I assume it does) you should be able to get one remailed to you, no?

I don’t think a hobbyist-hosted instance would count as a social media company.

Also, what’s Louisiana gonna do if the instance is outside their state? Send them strongly-worded emails?

• On my desktop: GNOME Evolution - but only because my university uses Outlook w/ Exchange (cringe) and the UI is slightly more tolerable than Thunderbird.
• On my phone: I just use the baked-in Samsung Mail app.

In terms of provider, I used to use Gmail for my personal, but got tired of Big G scraping my correspondence. I tried Proton, but its integration story is a complete joke (you can upload your calendar and contacts but there’s no DAV support, their IMAP bridge is a non-standard-compliant dumpster fire that doesn’t work with half the clients I tried…) so I ended up on Fastmail.

I’m not sure about the current offerings, but I think former Reddit apps transitioning to Lemmy (such as Sync) should retain any accessibility compatibility/features they had.

On the bright side, having Apollo on his resume should make landing a good dev job (assuming he didn’t have one already) pretty easy.

He still shouldn’t be on the hook for $250k though.

Out of interest what about the tech is not all the way there yet?

The durability issue. I shouldn’t have to rely on “getting lucky” if I want the display to not get a huge crease (or outright break, in the case of OP) - especially considering how expensive these devices are compared to standard phones.

Honestly, I’m jealous. Being a programmer means I spend a lot of time staring at LED displays whether I like it or not 🙃

I do already use dark mode (Dark Reader ftw) but for me, any emissive display seems to cause eyestrain over a long enough period. I rarely use the backlight on my e-ink reader, so it reads like crisp print on paper.

Maybe you were using really low-res/first gen e-ink? Or perhaps we’re just built different :p

My single tablet use case is ebooks. I despise the ugly “e-ink” readers and love the simplicity of a cheap tablet.

Dang, you’ve got eyes of steel. I could never read books on an LED screen - the eyestrain is just too much. E-ink doesn’t have that issue.

I’ve never really liked tablets - I much prefer a real computer. That probably explains our disconnect.

Because my university’s network is cringe, I’m unfortunately forced to run everything on a VPS.

This comes with a financial cost, and I have to carefully ration my computing power, but it does have some upsides - enough that I honestly prefer it now.

• It keeps my desktop sealed away from the wilds of the open Internet. Obviously the risk isn’t that great, but since every service you run represents a potential security hole… it’s nice to have a “disposable” solution like a VPS.
• I don’t have to worry about getting a static IP or using a service like Tailscale in order to talk to my services when away. All I have to do is point my Cloudflare DNS records at my VPS.
• Better uptime. I used to host my blog on my desktop (!) which meant it would go down whenever I rebooted/lost connection/whatever. My VPS restarts once a month to apply updates and is always-on otherwise.

I’m surprised people still want foldable phones. IMO they’re a gimmick - worse, a gimmick based on technology that clearly isn’t “all the way there” yet.

Power button fingerprint sensors. I had one on my S10e, and I loved it - with the way I held the phone, my thumb naturally rested on the power button, so it was pretty much auto-unlocked.

Now they seem to have fallen by the wayside in favor of in-screen sensors - which are cool, but ever-so-slightly more cumbersome. Ah well, still better than facial recognition.

Good news on the battery front: the EU is mandating that smartphones have user-replaceable batteries by 2027. It’s not clear if “readily removable” will mean “hot-swappable,” but… hope springs eternal, I guess?

Holy crap, I forgot about that feature from my dark-ages G4. That thing was a piece of crap, but I do miss that (and the twist to open camera.)

I had a side/power button fingerprint sensor on my S10e. The S22’s in-screen one is cool and all, but I really miss how my phone would be unlocked before it even came out of my pocket.

Was not expecting that sub to have 410k members.

Then again, sourdough is great, so I really shouldn’t be surprised.