MudMan

I keep having to repeat this, but the conversation does keep going on a loop: LLMs aren't entirely useless and they're not search engines. You shouldn't ask it any questions you don't already know the answer to (or have the tools to verify, at least).

Yeah, but that's solved through cross-login, which I've already seen used at least once in Pixelfed. Logging in with a pre-existing Masto account and importing your follows should have been the default solution, but I understand how the tech may not have been in place.

Yeah, but that's bad, though.

Hypercustomization is way more of a hassle than a positive in most applications. I will take a couple of binary settings, I won't design the UI for you.

My contention here is that the default UI for the *Bin is actually good.

You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.

I don't necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you're claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more "the light theme has made some debatable color choices".

Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I'm not sure if there's a reason you can't default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don't think it's a big deal. Plus highlighting a "what is this app" tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there's that as well.

Which is not to say that you're wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.

Yeah, man, storage is storage. Once you get down the redundancy chain enough even a crappy salvage drive on its last legs may end up being a cost-effective way to prevent some data loss later.

I'm actively considering going on a drive plunder run of old, semi-busted hdds both at home and in used sales sites to eventually build a static redundancy backup of files I know aren't going to change in the foreseeable future. Because why not.

I suppose that's the point of interoperability. I would much rather support an ecosystem of apps doing the exact same thing to satisfy different UX preferences than the excruciating endless talk of "which of these identical instances all plugging to the same service should I arbitrarily joing as an identity-defining statement" you get in Masto.

Hold on, that doesn't seem like an apples to apples comparison. You're doing light theme in one and dark in another. The light theme has a different balance (also, ow, my retinas).

The default Fedia dark theme I am using does not look like that at all. Sure, both the main column and the tool column on the right have the same emphasis, but you still get hierarchy from both the relative sizes and the positioning (if you're a left-to-right reader, at least).

Disagree hard with ugly and awkward. It being less of that han Lemmy is the reason I use it in the first place.

If anything, I'd swap the pros and cons around, because every time I accidentally respond to a Masto post over here and half the functionality is missing I have a few seconds of confused panic before I realize what's going on and drop that conversation altogether.

I use Mbin (well, Fedia, but same thing), and honestly I do that because of the interface. Lemmy's UX seems so much worse.

The microblogging thing is... there, but it mostly just serves some random post here and there. It's fine to be able to have a microblog follow in there if you want, but I think the assumption that you'd centralize multiple AP services in a single app now feels entirely obsolete. That doesn't get in the way and it's still a much better client for Lemmy than Lemmy, though.

Huh This seems like such a pointless scam when the refurb drive market is such a widespread thing. These days you can just say they're used and still offload them for decent prices.

Is this about the US? Is the US alright?

I was in a bookstore yesterday. I did have a chuckle at this self-help book called something along the lines of "How to Politely Tell People to Fuck Off", which proudly stated to be written by a social therapist or some other Pokemon evolution of a psychologist.

Otherwise it was novels from mainstay authors, young adult stuff whose quality was undecypherable from their "my cousin knows Photoshop" covers and a bunch of pseudo-academic highly specific texts from local self-published authors.

I was disheartened to see that the native minority language section keeps shrinking, especially among children's stuff. And while I was looking at that I also noticed the manga section is bigger than the graphic novel section and that is bigger than US comics, which were now nonexistent. More neutral about that one.