I don’t think someone heavily opposed to gaming would be considered a normie, they would be in their own separate extremist camp also apart from the average person.

Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.

I listen to things in my car a lot where the only forward button on that interface is a skip to the next episode button. I’d have to pull out my phone and open the app on my phone to find the skip forward 15s button.

My local library is 25 miles away and only open 4 days a week, plus it’s about 40 miles away from the city where I do all my shopping so it is really out of the way. There is a different library in the city where I run my errands, but they charge a hefty fee for non-residents.

For reading news, I recommend getting a tablet and a case with a stand to prop it up at a comfortable reading angle. It’s easier to read with aging eyes than a smartphone. It will still have the accidental long press problem, but icons need to be dragged a longer distance to be rearranged so there is a better chance it will snap back into the right spot after an accidental long press. Someone needs to make an elderly-proof launcher that has a way to lock things in place on the home screen and disable that long press there. Maybe someone already has? I haven’t played with alternative launchers in years.

I use Blokada 5 on my android phone which is a free, phone-wide ad blocker that runs as a local VPN based DNS service that blocks spam address DNS requests. They do have a newer version, 6, that’s cloud based instead of a local VPN and requires a subscription and I haven’t tried that out. Maybe that one is easier to reconfigure remotely if something important inadvertently gets blocked. The only reason I never tried it is I have a very limited income right now as a full-time caregiver. I have used Blokada 4 and then 5 for several years now.

My pi-hole on my home network is also pretty set it and forget it and protects all of my mother-in-law’s devices while she is connected to the Wi-Fi, which is most of the time since she only ever wants to leave the house for doctor’s appointments or occasionally to eat out. I bought a cheap orange pi zero to set the pi-hole up on and it lives next to the router. My MIL is a 70+ year old gamer so she is a little bit more tech savvy than your average elderly person, but she constantly falls for ads and terrible tabloid clickbait that shows up in her news app.

I kind of want to try setting up an RSS app for her with more curated news sources and see if that will give her a satisfactory news feed without all the junk. I used to use Google News, but it has become nothing but spammy tabloid links with no relevance to me. I mostly got my news through Reddit in recent years, but Lemmy reintroduced me to RSS and I’ve been working on collecting good news sources like back in the good old days before the social media firehose of info.

Unfortunately (for the purpose of offering advice), I have no experience with remote tech support. My dad is a retired computer engineer so he’s got a handle on things at his place. I live with the tech-challenged person in my family.

Wow, the half off student price ten years ago was $50/year in the US. You get it incredibly cheap!

Now you are supposed to sacrifice your sleep for Amazon? No thanks!

I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.

Blizzard also has Overwatch, StarCraft, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone.

I don’t really know the Activision side. I was a big Blizzard fan before learning about the Cosby room and their treatment of women in the workplace.

Microsoft lost an antitrust lawsuit a long time ago regarding making internet explorer a required part of Windows, so they had to allow other browsers in Windows for competition’s sake, but they didn’t get broken up. That might be what you are thinking of. I can’t think of anything Intel related though.

Wouldn’t cumulative user-seconds of screen time per day be plummeting if you can only see 500 tweets per day or whatever that limit was that he rolled out? I’d be doubting any company’s claims of record high viewership at a time when most of their users were reportedly being locked out of the site due to a new policy, even if their metric didn’t have such an oddly specific name.

I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That’s way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It’s no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.

I don’t think I ever even heard of Allo until the news articles started coming out about Google killing it off. I used Hangouts briefly, but I didn’t know a lot of people who used it. I am surprised they are trying chat again.

I think I read that it was based on PST, but I don’t remember where I saw that and could easily be thinking of something else. Sorry I haven’t got anything definite.

I’m also an elder millennial and the reason I played Doom was because my boomer dad was playing Doom. He bought it for himself and I got to play it too. It’s not like millennial kids were the target audience.

One of my earliest memories is spontaneously picking up the phone to call a friend, hearing a bunch of modem screeching, then hearing my boomer dad cursing up a storm in the other room because I had probably just killed his Doom session. Some of the boomers were Dooming just fine! The younger boomers were only in their early 30s when it came out, it’s not like they were too old to adopt new tech at the time.

It really was. I miss inbox.

I typed a reply and it seems to have vanished, so my apologies if you end up getting two similar yet not identical replies to this.

Thanks for elaborating. I did end up trying out Fluffychat the last time I looked into Matrix. It looks like Element on the web isn’t available on mobile, so I might give it a try later on my computer or download their app.

I still think the Element site should do a better job of explaining it’s also available for personal users for free. I had to go 11 links into their footer to find that information, the pricing page has no mention of their personal offerings at all.

Do they even have a consumer version? I’ve seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is “Business - $5/month/user”. I’m not an organization and while that’s not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I’m paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My “senior executive discussions” consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.

If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.

I can’t stand ads, but ad blocking is easy enough. I decided to leave because Reddit is only leaving me with terrible interfaces to use. The official app is painfully slow and bloated. I browse reddit to pass time on my phone, I’m not about to lug out my whole laptop or move over to a desktop to keep using the site with old Reddit + RES. All the terrible CEO comments since the announcement just make it easier because the tiny, niche non-Nazi alternatives are suddenly large and bustling platforms.