petrescatraian

@alyaza it's always great to hear about someone listing their ideas on their own blog rather than on social media. It just gives the message and the space more personality and offers a different experience than posting the same message on a regular social media platform.

I also saw your article titled what i would do for a third party i actually like and I must say that I do agree with you, despite being on a slightly different political leaning, but I totally agree with you on the topic that more parties would be needed in America. Like, if I was an American, I wouldn't know who to vote (I don't know who to vote here in Romania either, lol). And I also saw the argument that the two-party system was there, among other things, to keep extremist political forces away from the mainstream. Yet we nowadays see how one of these two parties has a candidate which is a threat to democracy himself, and a threat to the entire Western world as we know it. I believe that any political system which allows for multiple parties voicing their different opinions is what we need in a healthy democracy, otherwise the system is not fully representative for the regular citizen.

Keep up with your blog 😁

About my last week... well... how could I put it... hectic would be a really mild word to describe it. It was rather surreal. I'm now sitting in my bed and I still cannot believe it happened, and I still hope it was just a bad dream or something...

Last Sunday, I received the news that a friend of mine passed away. He was an awesome friend, always there for you, always of help and not only. We knew each other for more than a decade already. We've been to countless concerts and music festivals together, we traveled to a lot of places, I've even stayed at his place overnight on multiple occasions. He was about to turn 30 the next month. He did not show any signs of depression. He didn't really have any issue that I was aware of. Last time we saw each other last month, at a friend's birthday. Nothing that would make us aware of his problems at all, if he had any. He was also earning quite above average, had quite a good car, and he was about to move in an apartment that he just bought, in a new building (from what he said, it was a fairly large apartment).

He was buried this Wednesday, and many of his friends were people that I knew as well. And they said the same thing: we did not expect he would do this. We were all in shock, we just saw ourselves in a way we never saw each other so far...

I put a CW on this comment because this is really something that can come as a shock to anybody. I'm sorry for you if you're reading all this from Lemmy and you feel affected by all this, because it is not easy for me to talk about it (I think Lemmy doesn't support CWs as Mastodon, for example). Every time I tell someone about this, it is just too difficult for me to speak about it.

I just want to tell you to seek help whenever you feel like you're seeing no reason to continue with your life. I know it can be hard for you to see things differently, but do not stay quiet about it - speak about it. Speak to a friend, speak to a therapist if you can find one, create a burner account somewhere and post here on Beehaw, just don't let any of these things affect you so much that you decide to end it all. This friend of mine probably thought at some point that nobody could help him, but that was really not true. We are all deeply affected by his death and we (or at least I) just don't know how, don't know why he did this. Do not end your life, whoever you are. You still have people that look after you, you still have someone out there who cares about you, even if you do not feel like it, even if you feel lonely. And all these people would be deeply affected by your possible disappearance, more so if you are the one who takes your own life. Just don't do it!

Also, if you have a friend to who you might have become a bit distant for a while recently for whatever reason, take your time to message them - now, later, tomorrow, sometime this week - or give them a call, tell them what you feel about them and that you care about them. It will probably mean a lot to them.

@tardigrada I hope the fucker in Kremlin will leave us as soon as possible. It just all feels like a bad dream that you can't believe it's real...

@thingsiplay Last year they offered 20 GB free for every referral - both for you and the person you referred - because of their anniversary. And the features just make it such a compelling option as well. Such a great service.

@hedge

It does

@hedge I am quite a hoarder for cloud services, lol. The most private ones I use are Mega, pCloud and Nextcloud. Alternatively, you can also use Syncthing if you only care about syncing your files over.

@loops .ml is also the domain for Mali, but if someone from another country uses it, I guess you can be 90% certain that they are tankies. And going to fediverse.observer I see mastodon.ml is hosted in my country, even in my city! Bro, just... just get out of here! Get out of there or else we'll start another revolution!

@Gamers_mate

@Servais tbh, Kbin was way too much in development when the APIocalipse happened. But back then it was the only Reddit alternative in the Fediverse that didn't have extremist devs. So I also used to recommend it heavily, together with other people that probably shared my opinion. However, the rapid growth of Kbin (which was not so stable/feature complete, albeit interesting as a project) must have put a strain on Ernest (the dev/creator of Kbin) who eventually slowed Kbin development to a halt, also due to personal/health issues. He also tended to delegate his work far too little as well, which brought issues to the project in the long run.

Mbin seems being worked on by a team, and there are already multiple active instances with different owners, so I think overall it just seems to have a greater future.

Plus there's also Piefed, which looks to fix many of Lemmy's issues that the 2 devs don't care about and don't really want to fix them themselves.

As for me, I think I'll keep my main account here and not create any new accounts to explore other platforms. At least for now. Lotide seemed interesting as well, but its development halted and I still have a bunch of Mastodon accounts to keep myself accessing the Fediverse should my server go bust again anytime in the future. However, Mastodon is based on the Twitter/X UI/UX, which I'm not particularly fond of. And much of the Fediverse has been following Mastodon for a while now, with some notable exceptions.

Also, people do not seem to think of the Fediverse as a whole. The Fediverse has no technical barriers, but it does seem to have some psychological ones - people keep referring to Mastodon as a distinct entity, or to Pixelfed for example, but not think of both as being in the same place somehow.

I'm moderately happy about the Fediverse developments myself; there's plenty of content and there's more and more on a daily basis. But it just doesn't seem to gain so much traction outside the nerdier communities.

I'm also having a general displeasure about social media as a whole, and while I still browse Reddit (my account is still on the older Reddit interface, don't know for how long) and YouTube, social media is no longer a place where I feel happy going to.

Now, to each their own. If you're looking to consume stuff on social media, I definitely recommend going full-time on the Fediverse, as it is a growing place on the Internet.

@Gamers_mate

@Billy Somehow, Iran wasn't worried about escalation, hmm...

@Flatworm7591 I heard about libgen and sci-hub from my uni professors. Before that, I never knew anything about them.

@alyaza Quite well 😁 Looking forward for a few employment processes, hope I get a positive answer to one of them at least.

I got into the rabbit hole of YouTube videos about iPods, iPod refurbishments, upgrade and other media players in general. It's so fascinating that there are devices designed just for listening to music, especially since even the old Nokia phones came equipped with music players or had music playing capabilities. In fact, I used my phone to listen to music even before getting a smartphone (yes, I know regular mp3 players were a thing, but it was much easier to view what you were playing on a regular color LCD screen with an actual UI). Even more fascinating is seeing people actually upgrading these devices with more storage, larger batteries and new capabilities like wireless charging, Bluetooth connectivity (to connect them to wireless headsets), even making them able to stream from youtube.com/watch?v=ZxdhG1OhVn….

In fact, I am surprised that as of speaking, in 2024, there is still a market for music players, some even being Android based and with Google Play Store access, so you could install Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music or whatever you can find out there (be it a streaming service, music player or whatnot).

This, along with the fact that (as I said) I never owned a dedicated media player myself (none of the likes of an iPod at least), I think is what made me to pull an older phone out of the drawer and try to repurpose it as a dedicated media player myself. And so far, it has been a success for the most part. I don't know how will I use it outside my house in the real world (even inside the house as well, as I already have the bulk of the music on my PC), but it's just so fascinating. If you're interested, I can create a separate post on the DIY community so you can get some ideas.

@user68k I think this will be the first GTK3 app that will have an actual options menu instead of a tucked away hamburger menu with options. I think it's gonna be interesting.

@Powderhorn These have been the norm in my country already for quite a while FWIW, haven't tested if they change these prices often or not however.