A lot of people did jump to Mastodon, and apparently it had had another large influx of users yesterday after all the Twitter shenanigans. Not everyone stays though, obviously.

I think part of the issue some have with Mastodon is the lack of Twitter’s algorithm. It’s absolutely true to say it’s harder to find people and topics to follow on Mastodon for the simple reason that you’re not getting anything shoved in your face, which is a massive plus point for many (myself included) but can also make it appear initially less appealing.

Thanks for the recommendation. This is excellent, and so far it works brilliantly for a a PWA.

That looks rather nice. My Pixel 6 should be good for a few years yet, but I’d like to think my next phone will be a Fairphone if they keep improving like this.

I think the bubble has certainly burst. COVID resulted in loads of new consumer investers, and the visibility of crypto had never been higher. Exchanges were being advertised by major celebrities on Superbowl ads!

Then the market crashed, and all those investers realised what a mistake they’d made. I don’t think it’s a mistake many will make twice.

It was such a bizarre time, with major governments talking about minting their own NFTs or even their own digital currencies. That all seems to have quietly gone away now, thankfully.

I switched to Firefox from Brave a while ago, partly due to Mozilla’s Mastodon announcement and their general approach, and to be honest it’s been fine for the most part.

That said, I’ve absolutely run into some minor issues on a couple of sites that were indeed fixed by using Brave again.

I found PCPartPicker really useful when I last built a PC:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/

It helps you pick compatible parts, and links to sites you can buy them from. I’d still shop around for the best price after building your list(s), but it’s a great place to start.

I don’t use Apple products myself, although I do have an old iPad. My main issue with them isn’t a moral one though, it’s that Apple seem to design their products to work as slickly as possible with their own ecosystem to the detriment of everything else.

If you use an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple Watch and a Mac then you’re probably enjoying a great user experience. If you want to use an Apple device with anything else you’re probably in for some amount of pain. I’m not against them, but they’re not for me.

I do try and use FOSS software where I can, not least Lemmy and Mastodon, but my main devices are a Windows PC along with an Android phone and tablet. Windows is obviously closed source, and while Android itself is open source you can’t say the same for all the vital Google stuff on top. I have a plan to get my hands on a high specced Raspberry Pi when they’re finally back in stock and use it as my main home desktop for light use. If I had a laptop of my own I’d definitely be running Linux on it too.

I think everyone should absolutely look into FOSS hardware and software, although in reality I doubt most people would care. If anything it’s just the “free” part they care about, but there’s obviously a huge benefit in software and hardware being free for others to build on, fork and improve. I’d love nothing more than seeing everything work on this principle, but that’s sadly not the world we live in.