Apart from not being that interesting for now, the first line of defence for most is manually-approved sign ups, as far as I can tell.

When the Fediverse grows, I think that weeding out accounts that post slop will be the “easy” part; the hardest part will be to identify the silent bot accounts that do nothing but upvote.

Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.

You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you’re going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

SyncThing only syncs when both devices are online at the same time.

So a comon scenario is: You change the DB on your laptop, then shut it down. You open the DB on your desktop. Since the lapotp isn’t online at the same time, you are working with the old DB version. If you change it, you have two competing versions.

I don’t know exactly what happens then; I’m facing it and am procrastinating dealing with it ^^

Konversation is pretty nice

+1 for Kate

+1 for used Brother models. Mine is a MFC 27XX YY, which has decent Linux support and accepts third-party toner without complaints.

Yeah, unless one happens to have one of the beefier Raspi 4 or Raspi 5 variants (which, of course, cost way too much money if their sole purpose is to be a home server). To give specific recommendation for cost-effective beefier home server hardware: Used Thin Clients. For example, Dell T530 Wyse (or T520, or T540, or the 6x0 series).

Non plus ultra: Download the video and then upload to whichever PeerTube instance you use. At least if you’re confident enough that this won’t cause you legal trouble (e.g. cases like “fair use” should be safe).

FreeTube has a neat function to download comfortably (but make sure to pick an option with both audio and video).

I LOVE Freetube, but can it be linked to?

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

I think nothing stands in the way of doing this on local metal, as far as technology goes. Something similar has already been achieved for personal photo sorting, e.g. https://ente.io/

A few months ago I wrote out some recommendations around the same theme here. Extracts:

A good start is to install tldr. You use it like man, but it gives you shorter explanations – or rather, a short list of illustrative examples.

Going further, check out Fish instead of Bash. I haven’t use Fish yet, but it’s said to be much better for learning Linux commands as a beginner. Later on, you may switch to Zsh. In any case, hitting Tab once or twice will often give you a list of possible completions to the command you are typing.

Also, I hugely recommend reading at least one book about Linux. I’m now almost through with the O’Reilly book “Classic Shell Scripting” by Robbins and Beebe (ISBN 9780596005955). Despite the fact that it’s 20 years old, it helped me hugely – primarily with the shell and its commands, but also with understanding things like file structure.

It presupposes some familiarity with Unix-like systems and with the shell, so if one’s just starting out, the book “Learning the Unix Operating System” may be better.

I think so, yes.

It’s still workable for sure.

Above all, memorize one thing: When you update, and then reboot, keep an eye on the computer during reboot, especially during the early stages. That’s because every month or so, when the drivers have gotten updated, you will be presented with a (often blue) screen about MOK Enrolment, i.e. you need your UEFI that the new drivers are trustworthy. If you miss this screen, you’ll boot into a black screen or so without anything telling you what the error is, and to fix it you’ll have to enroll those keys manually – this is not prohibitively difficult, but annoying. (That’s if you have UEFI secure boot enabled. If you have it disabled, there is practically no pain at all, ever. You lose a bit of security though. Personally I have it disabled.)

I recall these times. As experience grows, one needs to do it less and less often :)

Also, if your filesystem is Btrfs (which is usually a great choice), check out Snapper. With it, when an update goes wrong, you can often revert your system to a previous state.

On Fedora, it doesn’t come by default, so you’ll have to install it. I don’t use Fedora, but this guide looks like a decent introduction: https://dustymabe.com/2025/01/07/fedora-btrfs-snapper-the-fedora-41-edition/ Or for something shorter: https://www.andotech.net/installing-snapper-on-fedora-a-comprehensive-guide/

For its usage, this tutorial from openSUSE should be quite transferrable: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial

If you have an AMD graphics card (or use Intel graphics), one of the biggest pain points is already nonexistent. If on the other hand you have a NVidia card, getting that to run often comes with (recurrent) pains. What is your graphics card?

+1 for Wero! We have to get it adopted. If anyone’s bank doesn’t support it yet, and you need to switch banks for other reasons, best include Wero support among your criteria. ING is among those banks whose support for it is the best.

Just so no-one thinks such issues don’t concern them because all they have in their house is a vacuum robot

While on my laptop I have to use some bluetoothctl (I think) with stupid pin-less setup and cannot use KDE’s own bluetooth applet. We’re both on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Does rofi-bluetooth help you a little bit with things?