Metallibus

Should Trump be convicted, I think it will alienate a group of voters into full disbelief of the existing system.

Good? Our existing systems across the board are entirely fucked. Straight white men generally benefit the most from these systems and have generally continued to turn a blind eye to these problems, as it's easy when you're in the "winning" position. If this somehow wakes them up, maybe we can actually fix something.

For me, it depends on the website.

Twitter to Mastodon is easy. I've never understood short form text social media. I never made a Twitter account but I have a Mastodon account so I guess that says something. But I still don't use it.

Instagram to Pixelfed has been a hard sell. I enjoy photography but have hated Meta. I hated Instagram and ended up making one just because it's the only real active community, even though it's compression, resolution, and aspect ratio garbage are all awful for actual photography. I've tried 500px, Flickr, Vero, and a bunch of others and they all have problems. Pixelfeds UI and community just both aren't great so I can't buy in yet. And I'm not even using Instagram much these days anyway.

Does YouTube count? I don't comment/post much, but I have very little faith in PeerTube or any of the others ever gaining reasonable traction. So many other attempts at this have failed and the content is too important.

Reddit to Lemmy has been a mix. I completely axed Reddit apps and don't check it daily and instead use Lemmy. Been having a hard time filling the content void. And when I want hive mind type feedback on obscure things / recommendations / tech problems, you just can't beat reddits 15 year history of content and opinions. But I am actively posting/browsing on Lemmy instead.

Even if apps store stuff internally, and other things can't find it, the owning app can give temp access to another app. Ie, if you click on it in the torrent software, it should be able to find the relevant media player etc and open that media player playing the file.

Not defending this though, it's fucking stupid for them to do it that way, but just pointing out it's not totally useless as long as they allow you to tap/open it from within their app.

I'm genuinely surprised there hasn't been any significant effort made to make it more readable.

Quite the opposite. They've tried to make it better, and in turn, they've made it worse.

They used to have a pretty straightforward Linux file structure, and you were expected to put things in the external Pictures folder. And downloads went to the external Downloads folder. Back then, internal storage was small and SDs were large, so apps couldn't really afford to store these things locally and the SD structure was well enough defined that it was pretty clear where pictures would go.

Now, Google has pushed against SD cards. They also started requiring more permissions for external storage. They've added some "documents" APIs that were supposed to make it easier to tag/find files, but it's a tangled mess and most apps don't touch it. And they've rewritten their storage model multiple times at this point. If you're writing a new app, it's unclear which model to even follow anymore because Google has created a giant cluster fuck of options and paradigms.

Google is actively making this problem worse and worse. I wish they had never tried to "fix" this in the first place.

As someone pursuing a career in health care I became more and more concerned because some store patient files and notes in unsecured text files/apps like notion, google docs and even excel.

This is just the beginning - the medical space is notoriously awful and also a place where you probably really care about privacy. But using secure alternatives is too annoying for most medical staff and they just see it as ankther hurdle. Actually getting people to use secure software that's not the software they're already used to is way harder than it should be.

People just don't understand or don't care. Convenience is way more important to people than anything else.

IMO the thing is that people don't care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn't block cookies, etc etc etc.

Most people don't actually care. Some claim they do, but then can't even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the "inconvenience"... So do they really care?

Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don't.

The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.

Yeah, my main problem so far has been finding communities actually worth following/joining/contributing to.

If suddenly tons of average people join, they won't really find communities, they'll deem that their analysis of Lemmy, and leave with tiny chances of a second chance. It'll just boom and bust in it's current state. Most people aren't interested in starting or growing a small community.

Meanwhile, if we stay at this size for a while, communities may form/grow, and as people trickle in, they'll grow bit by bit.

My point is these are just making you feel better at best. Even a perfectly efficient split system running off a perfectly efficient power source which was manufactured out of thin air without having any effect on climate change is still moving heat around. None of these address the core problem with the climate. Even at perfect efficiency they're just building you a small bubble to feel better in.

Or, put another way, this is the coldest summer in the entire remainder of your life.

Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)

I wish our choices had a 1% impact.... That seems extremely generous.

Aircon plus solar panels for the win? Other than the initial manufacturing cost, it's a fairly good solution.

Can't tell if you're thinking this is anything more than an emergency stopgap for people that can't bear living in their home, but.... All A/C does is spend energy to move the heat back outside, and also produce some more heat on the side. So it isn't a sustainable solution or fix, even if your energy generation is somehow perfect.

And swamp boxes are basically just a fan with extra steps that puts a miniscule amount of heat into the water. They feel a tiny bit better, but they're not really fixing anything either. That warm water still needs to go somewhere etc.