…sick of reddit kowtowing to billionaires interests

Welcome. If you’re not aware, BlueSky is seeded by venture capital money and is generally under the ownership of billionaires; their “federation” is you optionally running a server that hosts your own (meta)data but the access to use that data (your content feed) still goes through one and only one website owned, operated and moderated by billionaires. They’ve already made it well known they intend on adding ads to their platform and have not yet worked out actual server federation. $0.02

Not all TLDs (gTLDs, ccTLDs) are available at all registrars, so I use a mixture of NameSilo, Porkbun and Zone.eu (zone.ee same thing). Zone.eu/.ee is like “the Porkbun of EU” (kinda, not really) and they have some of the cheapest registrations for EU ccTLDs. If a ccTLD requires proof of identity if you’re a foreigner, Zone accepts a verified PayPal account as sufficient documentation.

Given this is programming.dev, run a git forge (Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, etc.) - for a single user (or even a small group) you don’t need to worry about a full DB engine, the builtin sqlite works just fine on a $5 cloud server. You could even work it into your blog posts on the same domain. $0.02! (and you could have your repos sync read-only to more popular services like Codeberg, Gihub, Gitlab etc. it’s a built in capability).

…and as solutions we have many companies who will do it all for you for $5/mo (more or less), the cost of running a basic cloud server. My time and energy in making sure my email is “always good” is worth paying $5/mo to let Fastmail handle the chore. $0.02

I mostly just want to ensure mine is visible to others.

This is the tricky part - you will be remote-invisible until someone from the other instance(s) follow you for any of your content to show up in their Explore (hashtags, etc.) feed for other people to discover you. Pixelfed.social is the biggest hub by far so getting on that radar is key (much like joining a small Mastodon instance and you want to be “seen” on mastodon.social e.g. - same processes).

So you want to follow yourself from your pixelfed.social account to your own domain.com, so that your domain.com profile is seeded (federated) for other pixelfed.social users to discover as they browse. It’s a hack but there’s no other real way given how “opt-in” federation works, unless you have pre-existing friends on pixelfed.social who subscribe to your domain.com for you right away so you don’t have to hack it to get started.

Pixelix just showed up on F-Droid two days ago, the dev open-sourced their code just recently. I find it to be a “better” (subjective :) ) client than PixelDroid after testing it for a bit. $0.02 to any readers. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.daniebeler.pfpixelix/

When I view your profile with my Pixelfed account (using Moshidon on Android) shows no posts?

This could be an incompatibility in viewing Pixelfed API data - try a client which specifically lists Pixelfed support, such as Fedilab - their (stickbro) profile shows up fine for me in Fedilab, $0.02.

Your favourite search engine -> “pixelfed no video preview” -> several Github issues that are all closed, some with commits saying something was fixed, others just closed without resolution.

I experience this preview problem viewing videos posted both by Pixelfed uploads (such as yours) and videos posted via Mastodon instances which I follow in Pixelfed. There’s something broken in Pixelfed software being able to generate video previews from several sources in my experience, which do not exist if you follow those same accounts from a Mastodon instance.

To expand on this, there are two settings you can put in user.js / prefs.js (desktop) or via about:config (mobile), documented on the Mozilla Wiki:

user_pref("media.autoplay.default", 5);
user_pref("media.autoplay.blocking_policy", 2);

Two bonus settings if you want to get rid of the “do you want to enable DRM?” pop-in bar when hitting one of those sites:

user_pref("media.gmp-widevinecdm.enabled", false);
user_pref("media.gmp-widevinecdm.visible", false);

hth

Quick update for anyone still reading this thread:

@[email protected] As with any other app, we flagged Fennec and Mull with KnownVuln until the app is updated. Contributors fixed the issues that delayed versions 130 and later. Stand by for the build.

https://floss.social/@fdroidorg/113384089915217604

A bit of backstory on how we got here - in June 2024 Mozilla chose to (a) integrate the source tree of Firefox Mobile into their huge monorepo (“gecko-dev”), and (b) move the source off of Github onto their own git servers (“Mozilla Central”). You can read about it in the now-archived old repo:

• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android
• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcoming-migration-to-mozilla-central

This was then compounded by a core Android build kit (“NDK”) choosing to remove parts of the toolchain which is/was used to build Firefox releases (ergo, forcing another change to build process):

• https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/2010

Together these have caused a bit of a kerfuffle in getting new releases compiled and released via the official F-Droid methodology. See the other comment about the Mull version in their private repo, they’re having to use a Mozilla pre-built clang (a compiler toolchain) now to make it work for the time being.

The link(s) to add their F-Droid repo if not running DivestOS: https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps.html#repos

The other data shows that posts and comments are going up linearly (a little suspicious but OK), but I wonder how the modlog affects the data (meaning how is it captured and when). I made one comment to a honest post yesterday (hosted on a remote instance), which then the post was deleted by admins like so:

Removed Post Any app for call recording ? reason: Rule 2: Please use [email protected] for support questions.

So my comment shows in my history but cannot actually be accessed; was this comment counted? was that post counted? Was I counted as an active user yesterday if that was the only activity I did all day? Was the one person who upvoted my comment before the thread was deleted counted?

Lies, damn lies and statistics. :)

I have been using Linux on laptops as main/only compute since around 1997 (started with an Inspiron 4000, PII-400 IIRC), Dell is generally extremely boring and very Linux/BSD compatible. I have been buying gently used Precision models (typically using local marketplace, Craigslist in USA) as they tend to have better build quality and non-janky custom parts (think “winmodem”). They last forever, pretty much every Linux/BSD distro works. The most important thing is to stay away from Broadcom chips and look for Intel eth/wifi. Stay away from Inspiron to avoid hardware problems, in modern times those are the bottom of the barrel janky hardware.

The Dell Latitude line used by businesses are even more boring than Precisions and really always have been - their BIOS has a somewhat unique charging profile “always plugged in” to extend battery life - I use two ancient E6330 models tuned to super low power modes as mini-servers (think anything you’d use a raspberry Pi for) that have been chugging away for probably 5+ years just running cron jobs, backups, Syncthing services and whatever I toss on them. Throw an SSD in anything and it just works - power goes out, batteries act as UPS. $100 USD each, “just work”.

Thinkpads have always been a Linux favorite, at least the old models when IBM owned the brand but not too sure about the Lenovo modern ones. Last Thinkpad I owned was a 32bit one back in like maybe 2010 and it worked just fine. They tend to be more expensive used than Dells (retain their purchase price better, like a nice used auto).