Most who use Arch prefer to use a customized tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment. I tried using i3, and I do understand tiling WMs, but they’re not really for me and I won’t be able to do a crazy design out of them.
Not a lot, at least not anymore. Brave has annoying cyrpto-ads that I always have to turn off every time I reinstall their browser, their sync service sucks, and ever since they dropped Bing, Brave search became useless.
Private trackers exist and some have frequent signup windows.
Vivaldi has a bunch of stuff I like - tab stacking, tiling, a functional sidebar that is actually useful, and full-on UI customization.
The colors are not that great. It’s like a beautiful city being covered in grey smoke.
Echo chambers are what happens often when you trust personalized algorithms. You pick specifically the things you agrree with, and then later you don’t get exposed to things beyond your own worldview and interests. And recently, algorithms have been proliferating all over the internet and there’s a lot of discouragement from using smaller services - a lot of it has to do with how the variety of content on the bigger social media networks is not yet replicated on smaller sites. The fact that smaller sites have now become usable thanks to Reddit and Twitter going down the drain makes me feel like on one hand I feel more free now because I can explore all sorts of sites and more people will be there, but on the other hand I am intimidated by the sheer amount of alternatives and my mind can’t manage with all of them at once, so I minimize my general social media usage. The fediverse is, in a way, consisting of “novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free”.
Some cheese is nice, some is cool, some is disgusting, some is straight-up inedible to me.
There is a variety of instances for Firefish, such as kitty.social. One weird thing I notices is that the Firefish logo is not consistent across all instances. ThatOneCalculator, creator of Firefish, was recently involved in some drama, so some instance owners put an alternative logo instead.
I like Firefish, I am on a Firefish instance myself, and I feel really good about it. It’s fun to use and it federates with Mastodon most of the time, and with Misskey some of the time. Unfortunately, microblogging on the fediverse is not as straightforward as forums on the fediverse, as they’re a lot more fragmented and there are 5 or 6 different platforms instead of 2 like we have here.
It is unfortunate that in my country, you pretty much have to use WhatsApp as it’s so common there.