Echo chambers are not dependent on having an algorithmic feed. It just matters that the people you talk with and the information you consume, etc, filter out dissenting opinions from what you hold.

Lemmy is still very much an echo chamber simply by virtue of the people who tend to be here. But we can balance that with time spent on other platforms, IRL relationships, etc.

This doesn’t really change your point at all, but I remember reading the tech news surrounding the Twitter sale to Musk as it was happening. If memory serves, Musk literally made the $420/share purchase offer as a joke, a joke that several lawsuits were filed to decide it was a serious and legally binding offer.

He memed his way into owning Twitter against his will, and then burned down everything to assuage his ego. But because he’s a goddamn billionaire there are literally no repercussions.

If it helps, you can dig into Androids settings and use Firefox for the default in-app browser for most apps. That’s what I did, anyway, and it’s been fantastic.

Well then. I’m unsure what news article I read that spurred me to try Firefox on mobile, but that’s my recollection of the order of events.

Huh. I was under the impression that proper extension support (eg ublock origin) only came about recently?

Oh man. Once Firefox on Android got extension support, I hopped on that train so hard. No ads on mobile browser? Heck yeah.

Rumble isn’t any better. It’s where my dad gets his COVID conspiracy material after folks got kicked off other platforms.

Long hard fight.

We take our Ws where we can get them.

You’re certainly not wrong about GIMP having horrible UI/UX. Big reason I don’t use it either.

DaVinci Resolve is not a replacement for Photoshop/Adobe as a whole, but it is a decent replacement for Adobe products AfterEffects and Premier.

For Photoshop alternatives, I’d start with GIMP for photo editing or Krita for illustration and digital painting.

I’m still on Windows because my drawing app of choice is Clip Studio Paint, which has no Linux version. I’ve read and watched several guides to getting CSP running on Linux, but it still scares me off.

But this Recall thing is so insidious to me… I might try to get it working on Linux anyway.

I’m unfamiliar with the exact situation here, but when it comes to generative AI as I understand it, CP image output also means CP images in the training data.

That may not strictly be true, but it is certainly worth investigating at minimum.

Clear temples?

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

That’s bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM’d video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.