Hell yeah I only enabled a couple of these and it already helps a lot, thank you!

lol no I just didn’t realize I had my stuff configured wrong. But I was searching for Piefed with the intent to join bc Lemmy’s devs suck and yeah, shit’s good. So if you want, you can consider this reply an ad for Piefed, tho it’s actually a neutral endorsement :3

Yeah, that’s why I’m getting away from them. Thankfully the issue I was having seems to be a config issue and not a problem with SearxNG.

Yeah I didn’t realize my settings weren’t configured right, so I did so, came back today and found they were switched back! That’s why I was struggling. I have SearxNG in my whitelist for cookies too, so no idea why that’s happening. With the settings changed, it works great!

Whaaat? That’s bizarre, I swear I had that set.

Nope, it wasn’t set. Still returned weird results so I’ll try that configuration the other commenter posted.

I know. I’m trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.

Thank you! I’ll have a look into these!

I’m sorry, are you talking about pawb.social? That’s the Lemmy instance I’m on and I’ve never heard anything particularly bad so please show me what I’m missing. Of it’s my Mastodon, I’m on bark.lgbt over there, which has no bad history from what I know.

What do you think makes an instance definitively leftist and do you have any other examples? I’m interested!

Posteo is a really good option for email as well. Dedicated to being green too, and not just for show, it seems.

You are posting in a community called “fuck_ai”

Oh, I found Graphene excellent! It’s just the notifications are pretty essential and I cannot get them working outside of one app. That’s the only reason I criticized it.

Are the Jolla and the FLX1 harder to swap OSes on if needed, like you said? I’ll consider the Fairphone as I know it’s the most popular option, but I’ve also heard criticisms of parts not being available or software support being dropped. Few and far between but considering how much good press it’s gotten, I’d appreciate your take on that. That said I’m sure they wouldn’t mind using an app emulator as long as it’s functional. I’ve helped them get Windows games running through Wine on Mint and also got them the BizHawk emulator for old games and stuff, so they’re no strangers! haha

But hey, thanks so much for this, it’s really helpful.

Thank you, I’ll have a look!

Tried that too. Its not federated and generally just didn’t like me lol

Sorry, I don’t knowingly support crypto bros or war profiteers if I can help it. Plus if in looking for an alternative to a bad service, I’m not gonna give cadence to the platform already doing shitty stuff, just for it all to crash again once that one gains traction.

I’ve heard Matrix was involved in some crypto bullshit and military operations of some sort. I want an alternative but Matrix is just shady enough all around for me to stay the hell away.

Thank you for actually giving me an explanation instead of just calling her comics unfunny lol

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The only commercial social media I use anymore (or at least post on) is Bluesky, and I’m getting weary of that, too. I’ve switched completely to open source operating systems and workflows in the past year or so. During that time I’ve also become vegan and am trying not to go to any sort of shop at night. That last one has nothing to do with the state of things at this very moment, but I don’t want to give companies more reason to force people onto late shifts when working in retail/customer service already sucks and even full time won’t get you close to a living. The last thing anyone needs is their sleep thrown off, as I know from struggling with it myself. I may not be able to stop buying things, but fuck working when you should be sleeping. Unless you’re literally an essential worker, in which case those shit shifts should be cycled between people, not consistent.

…I didn’t mean for that to become a rant lmao

Plus with entertainment stuff they’re usually finished once released (or at least they SHOULD be cough cough game industry). It would be better if every game was open source, especially since there are tons of old games that could do with revamps but are too niche to invest in. If we had the source though, die hard fans would be all over that shit and wouldn’t have to spend years decompiling and romhacking! But that said, creative tools need to he constantly updated and should be open source always in case something goes bad. My ROM of Spyro for the PS1 isn’t changing anytime soon, so while it would be better for the source to be out there, I’m not worried about it suddenly becoming unusable.