Spyke

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Is there any truth to this?

I moved over to Bluesky basically the minute I could get an invite, because I could see the writing on the wall for Twitter; and there is SOME toxicity for sure, but you control how much.

Bluesky has a completely chronological feed composed singularly of accounts you follow. If you don't follow shit-stirrers, you will not see any shit.

Having said that, they can still show up in the "comments" of skeets you'll see, but the block system is so effective, that they are not usually showing up anyways.

To me, that is the difference between Bluesky's moderation and other websites. Bluesky has very little official moderation, but has extremely powerful blocking tools (their blocks server connections between subskeet, there are curated block lists, atomic blocking, etc). If you subscribe to trusted and vetted block lists, you will probably never see a chud on Bluesky in your life. You do need to verify the trustworthiness of the list in advance, though...

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Early Access: Become a tester for Boost for Lemmy and share your feedback 🚀

I just installed the app and so far it's working pretty well, though if I'm being honest, I am definitely a little concerned by all the baked-in tracking.

In terms of features I'd be interested in seeing there are three that come to mind:

  1. Community icons in compact/ dense views. While Lemmy is still in its infancy, I have to browse c/All most of the time and being able to visually see the community the post is coming for is definitely helpful for browsing.
  2. Multiple accounts in one feed. In my opinion, this is one thing that Lift-off has over every different Lemmy app. With so many instances with varying levels of federation, I find being able to browse all my accounts at once to be a very convenient feature.
  3. Being able to download to an SD card. I know SD cards are a dying breed, so this is probably low priority for you, but as someone with very low internal storage; but a very large SD card, it's always a welcome feature when I can find it.

Overall I would say this app already shows a significant amount of polish. Hopefully the development can continue even further.

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In retrospect I like Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Honestly, I think Crystal Skull's main problem is regardless of the quality of the movie, the franchise already ended.

The Last Crusade wrapped up the series perfectly (in my opinion) and even the title implied it should be the end ("The Last Crusade" referring to the most recent attempt to obtain the Holy Great and also Indy's final adventure). I know nothing happens which technically prevents another movie; but it bookends the series well by bringing back Sallah and Nazis from Raiders and it even literally ends with him riding off into the sunset.

It was written in such a way because Lucas and Spielberg didn't have anything left to say with the franchise or character, and there was no fruit left on the vine (so to speak).

A lot of the issues people have with Crystal Skull come from it trying to do something new with the character and setting since the story was already completed in the previous installment.

All this to say I don't think it was a bad movie necessarily, just one which struggles to validate its own existence.

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What are some Redditisms that Lemmy needs to avoid?

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I suspect powermods are more of a myth than reality, but I agree we should be concerned with any instance becoming the defacto site for Lemmy.

I think the best way to avoid this is already in motion (though slowly), which is to have smaller topic instances which house the topic in its entirety and don't have as many users (for example there is one for Star Trek and one for Android already). This way, regardless of your instance you still have access to the topic.

That's just my 2 cents, anyways.

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10 days after 3rd party reddit app shutdown, Lemmy's top 10 instances combine for a thriving userbase of 234,000

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I actually quite like having Beehaw being proactive about their users' safety/ mental well-being.

I wound up making a second account on Lemmy.world so I can see what's going on in the larger Lemmy community, but I also appreciate being able to browse and post in a safer environment. I just wish the Lemmy back-end had more nuanced federation/ defederation options and better mod tools so I didn't have to make a second account to browse the extended Lemmy community.

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What are cheap phones with good cameras?

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I thought about that, but since this is for a photo wall type situation (where there are props and things and you take your picture), I want the photo taking to be as automated as possible since people would be using the timer feature a lot. I'd be concerned that the autofocus wouldn't be correct, or something else that causes the photo to come out poorly if a real camera was used (without a dedicated operator).

If it wasn't for that, a standalone camera would be suitable (depending on the price).

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What are some Redditisms that Lemmy needs to avoid?

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That's quite interesting.

To be honest, I was never active enough to encounter a power mod; but I suppose anyone could go overboard trying to protect their community (even if they wind up doing more harm than good). Without having encountered any power mods, it's hard for me to say what percentage fell into that category.

In your experience, did the level of power of the mod seem directly proportional to their level of overboardness/corruption?

I apologize if the answer seems obvious. I keep hearing about the power mods, but since I've never seen one in action, I would certainly like to learn more.

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DISCUSSION: Episode 14

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I'm pretty late to the party here, but in case you never got to read the interview, I wanted to let you know you can use Google translate to translate whole webpages. I can't confirm the accuracy of the translation, but it seemed like it could have been fairly accurate.

This is the link to the Google translate page, if you are interested.

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What are cheap phones with good cameras?

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Right now I'm targeting sub 200USD (used), but the lower the better since I'm not sure how much use I'll actually be getting out of it.

When I looked online, I saw some used/ C-stock Pixel 6/ Pixel 6 Pros which are pretty close. Surprisingly, I didn't see a huge drop in price between the 6a and the 6/ 6 Pro (or at least but as much as I was expecting).

At this point I'm hoping the price will drop after/around Black Friday.

coffee

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What is a good low budget espresso machine? (Or what are signs to look for in a cheap espresso machine that indicate quality?)

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I used to have a popcorn popper with the side vents, but that broke; so now I use a popcorn popper with the vertical vents and a glass chimney from an oil lamp. I usually roast through the end of the first crack, which usually winds up around Full City.

I have noticed a number of comments suggesting a new grinder. I've always had an "if it ain't broke" mentality when it comes to buying new things, but I saw Costco had a burr grinder for ~50USD; so I may try to pick it up.

I am a little curious, though. How does that grinding method affect the flavor? I thought it just affected the uniformity of the grind...

android

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Why are there still no extensions for Chromium on mobile?

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It's incredibly difficult to get the non-mobile-approved extensions added to Firefox. I remember it took me a couple of hours to get it configured and I had to change my browser to the nightly version, which I did not want to do for stability reasons.

It was even more difficult to install "unsupported" browser extensions. I had to install a very old version of Fennec F-Droid, install the extension, then update to the most current version of Fennec to keep the extension. Through trial and error across several different Firefox versions, I probably wasted 3 hours getting it set up on my phone.

If you are not motivated and tech savvy (ish), the chances of getting a non-supported extension on Firefox are quite slim.