Matt

You can have links open in NewPipe by setting it in Android’s settings:

Settings -> Apps -> All apps -> NewPipe -> Open by default

And then set things up in there

https://floorp.app

Firefox fork with features like the sidebar, vertical tabs, and more. It’s a vivaldi-like gecko browser, give it a shot.

In this case, I would check out the Floorp browser. It is a Firefox fork that plans to be more like Vivaldi and have lots of features, including vertical tabs.

I don’t get this take - because if this was the plan, why not just shut Twitter down straight away instead of whatever is going on right now?

The actions of the platform don’t indicate they’re trying to kill it, just that they have really bad ideas trying to make money off it.

It depends what we mean by “bad with technology.”

A lot of posts here are talking about how the current young generations (Generation Z and Generation Alpha) are bad with technology as they don’t understand anything, and this is true, but to most people being “good with technology” means you’re good at using it for desired results, not necessarily understanding how things work or how to troubleshoot.

In my opinion: No. Due to the type of technology that the millennials grew up with, they are generally good at adapting to new and changing technologies, so I suspect they’ll be quite good at keeping up. Whether this will hold true for Z and Alpha is to be seen.

Yes - but the vast majority of people are not going to be downloading forks or modified versions of software, they will always get it directly from the source.

The “default”, so to speak, has a lot of power.

Petitions have weight providing they’re coming from the right places. There’s a difference between the random internet petitions that random users make, and petitions coming from bodies such as unions or regulatory bodies.

This is a petition being put forward from a well known organisation, so I would gather it actually has some weight.

They definitely exist - quite a lot of them in fact - it’s just after the big migrations in 2022, the kind of people who tend to get popular on Mastodon are the more “serious” posters, as they’ve eclipsed the memers in popularity. (Eternal September kind of thing)

If you check out the explore and local feeds of instances such as Wet Dry World or Beige Party, you’ll find the meme posters, who you can then follow.

What doesn’t help either is that meme posters never use hashtags, even though they’re the primary way to be discovered on Mastodon. On the other hand, people who are posting “serious” takes tend to use hashtags a lot - this also helps skew the meme posters away from people. Unfortunately, hashtags have gone completely out of vogue and just aren’t used by most people.

Mastodon is implementing full text search soon though, most likely with 4.2.0 (the next version), which should hopefully make things easier.

Kind of surreal seeing my own Mastodon post linked, damn.

If you’re curious about the details I refer to, there’s an indepth article on lwn.net regarding this from 2016 here: https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/

I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.

I know that feeling, which is why I moved to Firefox quite a long time ago.

Jumped around some forks for a bit, and now I’m settled on Floorp for desktop and Mull for Android.

If you’re wanting a Firefox-based browser with sidebar / vertical tabs, I’d take a look at Floorp.

It aims to be a Gecko equivalent to things like Vivaldi, you can get it at https://floorp.app. The recent version 11 release is fantastic.

No, because what is the chance people will give up YouTube?

Not very high, I’d say!

For what it’s worth I’m not saying that - it’s just a common argument I’ve seen online lately in these spaces. I don’t actually know if it’s true because I don’t use Google Search.

This is my take too - Google Search and YouTube especially which are owned by Google.

Even if Chrome had like 5% market share, surely they could just push this anyway? While the Chromium monopoly is partially to blame for this, I’d argue the centralisation of the web is as well.

Sure, “Google Search is useless now, you can’t find what you want!”, but the vast, vast majority of people still and continue to use it, and nothing will change that most likely.

Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.

While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.

Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.

You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these “free” products that do everything you need them to, so they’ve built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.

Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn’t see this as they don’t follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that’s all people care about.

There’s been a few comments on here talking about Firefox on Android being laggy compared to Chrome on Android.

Nobody seems to have mentioned this, but the main reason this is and/or appears to be the case is because Firefox is capped at 60Hz, whereas Chrome will display at 90Hz, making it feel much smoother.

No, I have no idea why.

Edit: The above is misinformation after I did some research - it appears that resisting fingerprinting causes the browser to set itself to 60Hz, but this can be disabled to get your screen’s refresh rate, but of course this means throwing away a privacy protection…

1. It’s probably better to think of each instance as its own website, except each website can talk to any other website. You can make multiple accounts because each instance is standalone (think of them like separate forums, if it helps), they don’t share account data with each other.
2. There’s not meant to be. Accounts are owned by each individual website, and the entire system is designed to be entirely decentralised.
3. In practical use, not much, but depending on how each instance federates, you may find it useful to view content that is blocked by one instance and not on another.