I know the scene is in a rut right now with iOS 16 having pretty much no hope (and with iOS 17 right around the corner), but I wanted to see if anyone else is using a jailbroken iPhone (or any other device) on a day to day.
If you are, drop your device, version and tweak list, I wanna add some new tweaks to my collection! My favs at the moment are Jellyfish (LS clock replacer), Saw (removes space at the bottom of the screen) and Ampere (iOS 16 style battery)

This month, I have been exploring reddit alternatives due to the ongoing events currently going on the site. It resulted in me requesting to be invited to this site, but I also played around with Lemmy, Kbin, Beehaw, and other sites within the lemmy/mastodon network. The conclusion I have come to is that these federated sites shows a lot of potential into becoming something interesting if proper care is put into it by the community and the mods and admins. But as it is now, it is fundamentally broken, ill-equipped to handle the userbase it has inherited from the reddit fallout, and potentially dangerous if steps aren't taken to protect users and their communities.

The signature feature, greatest strength and biggest weakness of these sites all lie within the "fediverse" (which I hate the term. gives me "metaverse" vibes.) From how I understand it, There are several different instances of lemmy that acts as its own site, hosts it's own content and users, and can have its own rules, features, and restrictions. All the content of these instances can be featured on other instances, basically allowing you to see all the communities, users, and content within the fediverse without having to leave the instance you are on. The admins are also able to restict the content of other instances from being shown on their site, though how this works I don't completely understand, and I'll go into detail later.

Anyway, I figured all this out through a lot of trial and error. When I first tried to search for and join Lemmy, I ended up joining the Canadian instance by mistake, and my feed was mostly Canadian related news and communities. I eventually figured out there were several differences I could join. I ended up joining lemmy.world and kbin because they were the most popular, but I basically had to create sepperate accounts on each.

I started out spending most of my time on Kbin. I was mostly following gaming communities, hobby communities, a few tech communities, and the lgbtq community. one thing I noticed in the comments in some of the lgbtq posts were a lot of transphobic comments. Granted they were heavily downvoted, and there was a lot of pushback from the community members, but they were featured near or at the top of the comments, as if I were sorting by controversial on reddit.

I also noticed there were a lot of pro-Russian articles featured in the news, with the majority of the comments pushing Z-propaganda. Apparently a lot of these came from an instant called lemmygrad, which is a pro-China, pro-Russia instance of lemmy. To the fediverse's credit this particular instance is blocked by most other instances, but it didn't stop me from seeing many of these posts featured, or users from that instance commenting in other subs.

At this point I was starting to get a little skived out. It gave me the same vibes Voat gave me during the reddit migration of 2014. I decided to try lemmy. world instead, since it seemed a little more down to earth. Had a few of the same problems there, though I began to sort some of them out as I began to learn the site better. It was around this time when the news that Beehaw, one of the instances that hosted many of the lgbtq and other communities I followed basically unfederated lemmy.world and a few other popular instances due to harrassment from the instances. At this point I was getting fed up, but thought, maybe I'll stick it out, and just follow Beehaw and Lemmy. world separately. After joining beehaw, I posted some of my grievances on the chat community there. In the end, I ended up getting an inbox flooded with notifications, which I couldn't turn off, many of which were replies from the post ranging from supportive to accusational, to some harrassing DMs. This happened on beehaw, which was supposed to be one of the "safer" instances, but many of the replies came from off the instance, and even from instances defederated by beehaw. What's worse is I even posted one of the means spirited replies as an example, and many people accused me of making it up because they couldn't find the reply itself, which I guess you can or cannot see depending on the instance your on and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS AT THIS POINT!

I ended up deleting all my accounts on the fed instances I had accounts on, except for beehaw, because the interface would often keep infinitely loading. The gripes mentioned above aside, I would frequently have issues with the site breaking, up and downvotes not showing the proper numbers, replies disappearing into the ether, accidentally double posting, seeing infinite amounts of the same comment posted over and over again, infinite loading, and so one, no matter what instance I was on.

At this point I have given up on the fediverse. Maybe if all the bugs are ironed out, and the site(s) are better managed, maybe I might return to it. But as it is now there are just way to many fundamental flaws that get in the way of me getting any enjoyment out of it. And none of the communities ever felt like a replacement for the subreddits I left behind.

That all being said, I have enjoyed my time on Tildes so far, and I think it is due to the fact that it is a smaller and better managed site than anything on the fediverse. The discussions here feel a lot more down to earth, the communities safer. And hell even the disagreements actually worth engaging in. Granted, there are a lot of niche topics missing here because subs aren't community created, but it's nice being able to view a site, and not have to self filter half the site because anything and everything is overloading my feed.

Anyway, forgive me if this was hard to follow. I wrote this at 4am with not a lot of clear direction. Just wanted to get my thoughts on lemmy and the fediverse out there, and why I decided not to stick with it.

Hi all, first post so hope I do it right.

I just read the Tasker post and thought I'd post a question/request here about it.

On my old Samsung S21 I wrote a simple Tasker script that detected a change in volume on one of the sliders, eg Media, and then adjusted the others, IE System, Notification and Call, to match with a little check, ie %VOLM neq %VOLR.

It worked fine in my Samsung but goes all over the place on my new Pixel!

Has anyone else seen this or can post something that works on Pixels? Or maybe my scripts need some work!

The trigger is variable set, IE VOLM, and the actions are to set the other 3 volumes to VOLM if they are not already set to that. And I have 4 of those, one for each variable.

And advice appreciated!

I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for questions to self-hosting problems - especially for smaller projects - the answers are nearly always found within posts on that sub.

At least with things like programming, there is stackoverflow and a bunch of other small communities.

I'm going to end up going to Discord to find my solutions, which is the next big community. But it means having to go on there and ask the question (that has probably been asked hundreds of times before), rather than just searching the issue.

I'm currently stuck in a hospital waiting room for probably the rest of the day, so brought my tablet along in the hopes of still being able to get a bit of work done. Plan was to use Termux to ssh into my home computer, but realized too late that this tablet's ssh key hasn't been authorized yet (it's pretty new), so that's a no-go.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good VPS host that charges only for the time you're using it? The day could still be salvaged if I could get into a fresh linux box that can run docker. The only pay-as-you-go VPS I've ever used is Amazon EC2, which is fine, but I'm hoping there are better options that are a little less cumbersome to spin up and tear down.

I just recently joined Tildes (absolutely loving it so far, by the way) and also recently left Reddit.

r/Tasker will probably be the hardest for me to let go of since I'm an avid Tasker fan/user, so I'm just trying to gauge the audience for that type of discussion and topics here on Tildes.

I'm not as big of a power user in phone automation as I would like to become but I'm fairly savvy and am learning more all the time.

+1 for slashdot, mainly because of intelligent topics and conversations about science, technology, scifi, games and all that fun stuff. Community participation and quality discourse made it interesting.

Everything on popular social media "out there" now is about click bait and sound bites, even comments and replies. Posts (and communities) are reduced to nothing more than grabbing a few seconds of attention.

Hello ~tech,

I have a Mi Power Bank 2C (PLM06ZM) and wish to upgrade it to able to charge or be charged with a 65W USB C port, with minimal damage, harm and according to USB C PD standards.

My chargers use 9V, 12V, 15V and 20V, the last one which my ThinkPad X280 uses.

Online searches for a 65W power bank enclosure without the batteries yield no suitable results, so I might need to use a PD Decoy board.

Are there any advice, links to guides and resources I could use to accomplish my objective?

Thank you.

AI Virtual Assistants are on the rise, and logically it seems like I could use one to support productivity, small business, neurodivergent accomodations, etc., BUT, when reviewing what's out there they don't seem super useful.

Otter seems the most useful because it can attend web meetings and record, contextualize screenshares, and sift the transcripts into action items, but it cant go to all webinar services and I'm not sure I can log into this in a corporate platform. Others seem to be able to check a calendar or make a reminder, but nothing I would pay for.

Some use cases might be gathering basic info from clients, scheduling meetings (calendly can handle this), blocking time for my task lists, writing basic email drafts, adding up expenses each month, sending reminders for customers, etc.

All of this could happen with various tools, but seem like good territory for an AI Virtual Assistant.

So, have you found any AI VAs that would be worth paying for? Anything that saves time or makes life easier?

I just saw this post in the /r/ModCoord subreddit, which lists multiple instances of Reddit admins contacting moderator teams of closed subreddits with this message:

Hi everyone,

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. We are reaching out to find out if any moderators currently on the mod team would be willing to take steps to reopen the community. Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. The ability to find and make these connections is incredibly important to many people and ensuring that active communities are able to remain stable and active (and open) is very important.

Our goal here is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is usable for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community please let us know.

Shit is getting real. The admins are looking for scabs who are willing to cross the picket-line and do the work the strikers are refusing to do.

It's not like this wasn't predictable. We all knew this was coming. It's still surprising to see it actually happen.

It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start:

• Advanced Tables: Very useful for adding and managing markdown tables using simple intuitive keyboard strokes.

• Callout Manager: I tend to abuse the callout function (in my academic vault, I organize any kind of information inside a callout with the source of the info as the title), so it is good to have control of the colors for different kinds of callouts.

• Minimal Theme Settings: Nothing much to talk about. Just some eye candy to make my notes easier on the eyes. Plus, the focus mode is very good for study sessions.

• Obsidian Matrix: Allows me to organize some mathematical LaTeX code properly.

• Reading Time: Useful to grasp the length of a longer note at a quick glance.

• Recent Files: Helps me set myself around my files.

• Style Settings: Complement of "Minimal Theme Settings" to achieve maximum eye candy.

• List Callouts: I use it only in my personal projects vault. It helps me give particular emphasis to specific topics within my lists.

• Table of Contents: Useful for longer, heavily-structured notes.

Aside from that, I also have four CSS snippets:

1. Align: Aligns my linked figures to the center of the page.
2. Callout: Specifies the size of callouts (useful, as I mainly structure my notes inside callouts).
3. Hide: Hides my "resources" folder from the Obsidian explorer (this folder contains files such as figures and PDFs that I link into my notes).
4. Justify: Justifies all the text in read-mode.

In this article from The Verge posted today "While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that"

Ironically mere minutes before this article went live, Reddit admins posted this to /r/modsupport.

"Leaving a community you deeply care for and have nurtured for years is a hard choice, but it is a choice some may need to make if they are no longer interested in moderating that community. If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team."

This statement not only completely contradicts what was "pledged" by Spez, but is also a very clear threat to subreddit moderators telling them to fall in line or get replaced by someone who will.

More articles that came out today about this subject:

Kotaku: Reddit's CEO Is Just Making Everything Worse

NBC: Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he'll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’

MacRumors: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts

ARS Technica: As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty

NPR: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'

The full Verge interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

This is sort of a "does anyone else?" type question, but I think it can create some interesting discussion.

We have become accustomed to having many things for free online. Search, social media, news, videos, games etc. The price of course is ads and our personal data. But spending money on these kinds of services that exists for free sometimes feels like a hurdle to overcome. I recently gave the paid search engine Kagi a try, and I spent way too much time pondering whether it was worth the $5. Yet I can spend ten times as much on random physical purchases or a round drinks with only a few seconds of decision making.

Even though we have lived with digital products for decades now, having something tangible and physical between your fingers still feels better. With some exceptions, because most people are paying for streaming services but renting movies in the video store have always cost money, so we are used to that - unlike stuff like search and email which many of us have gotten used to being available for free.

Can this ever change outside very tech-minded people? Because services that rely on subscriptions rather than dataharvesting and ads do exist, but with the exceptions of maybe the big streaming services, few get wider appeal and the masses flock to the so-called free services instead. I find it almost depressing that we have all these brilliant and innovative tech companies around the world doing amazing things, but a good deal of it all ends up with the goal of showing more ads. It is hard to compete with free, but is it possible to challenge the current most successful business model of "paying" with ads and data?

To set the stage, I've always been a fan of non-nonsense reliable phones. My cellular usage started with a Nokia brick, moved on to a few Motorolo flip phones, then entered the Blackberry world as soon as data service become available in my area. With the demise of RIM, I went o a Moto X, made a misstep in to the Samsung world, then to a Pixel, a Pixel 3XL, and now a Pixel 7 Pro.

I only made the jump to the 7 Pro due to the 3XL starting to show it's age. The charging part wouldn't always connect, the battery would barely make it through the day, and the case was starting to fall apart. Of within three days of removing the case I dropped the phone, cracking the glass back....

The 7 Pro is awful to hold, without a case. I was waiting a week for the Spigen Liquid Air case to show up, and during the time I hated using the phone. The camera bulge felt awkward and sharp, the surfaces were slippery and the phone would slide around. The rounded edges of the screen would produce phantom taps, just all around a bad experience. Now that I've added the case though, it feels a whole lot better.

The user experience has been fairly good, thought not without some annoying bugs. I did the migration from my old Pixel to my new one, and while it did a reasonably job, preserving the launcher layout etc, the app installation process was strange. Google Play tried to install all the apps, but was stalled. I had to tap on each app to manually install them, they were just sitting there "Pending...", whether I was on battery or charger, WiFi or mobile. Once everything installed, and I added my accounts, it was fine, and now apps auto-update.

Notifications are acting a bit funny with Reddit is Fun, although that won't be an issue for much longer :-(. If I get notified of Mod Mail and a Message in RiF, tapping the notification message does nothing. This worked fine on the 3XL. I've also had one spontaneous reboot, and one night where the phone was plugged in, but decided not to charge. Lots of people complained about heat issues, which was a problem for me on the 3XL, but only in extreme cases. After sitting out in full sun with the 7 Pro, I'd say it is about the same, possibly a bit better regarding it's overheating. Many people also reported that the phone would feel warm/hot in their hands for the first few days as it "learned" your behavior. Never experienced that. Battery life and (lack of) heat levels have remained the same.

Akin to this: https://tildes.net/~tech/1670/redditors_of_tildes_which_subreddits_are_you_missing_the_most_during_the_blackout

What can we leave behind?
What should we leave behind?

For me, the one BIG thing is the stupid puns.
Threads full and full and full of puns, one after the other.

Case in point:
https://tildes.net/~movies/16bf/chasing_horse_faces_sex_assault_charges

I can so live without that side of reddit.

edit: Yeah, that "thread" is two comments long, but I just got reddit flashbacks just seeing those.

Mine is a Facebook group called ALDI Aisle of Shame. I don't know if it's okay to link to it, so I'll just let you all google it if you want to check it out!

Not too long ago on /r/femalefashionadvice, someone mentioned a product in a comment section and I went to look for it online. This lead me to said group and the place was so unexpectedly incredibly wholesome..! It is the silliest thing. There are more than one and a half million members all praising the quality of ALDI products, and posting pictures of their hauls.

Recently, a trend was to post pictures of your dog and even a pony in hats gotten from ALDI and it is just so much fun! Even women doing the Spiderman meme in real life as they spot each other with the same outfit from ALDI.

PS: I am aware Tildes is text-focused so please let me know if this many images in a post is against the spirit of Tildes! Wasn't sure if it's ok to include images in a text post like this.

I currently have a setup using Google Workspace, StableBit DrivePool, and Cloud Drive.

I recently received notification from Google stating that I will no longer be permitted to exceed their allotted storage limit of 5TB. However, I am currently utilizing over 50TB of storage.

In just one month, my service with Google will be transitioned to read-only mode. Considering my familiarity with DrivePool, I am concerned about the potential for drive corruption if I continue using the service until I find a suitable alternative.

I need help to determine if my drive would be at risk of getting corrupted during this transitional period?