Ugh, I hate it. My girlfriend though watches the (German synchronized) version to fall asleep.

Bright side, she hasn’t murdered me yet!

I mean, “nobody can be this stupid” might actually have protected them in the past… We’ll never know!

Disclaimer: I host and use XMPP. I like using it.

That being said: the question isn’t if there’s any client, the question is if there’s a good client.

And my god, do XMPP clients suck ass. At best, they’re decent (monocles comes to mind, for example), but I actively loathe interacting with Linux desktop XMPP clients. There’s not a single one that is competently designed, or rather, they are all so fucking bare-bones and ugly looking.

“But that doesn’t matter!” yes it does shut the fuck up.

99% of the population doesn’t give a shit if you support the latest OMEMO spec or are written in memory safe rust or whatever else.

It takes a a fraction of a second to realize “this client sucks” and at most an additional minute to figure out “…and it’s not suited to my use-case”.

I also host matrix and use it extensively on all my devices. There actually are nice clients, and even some Discord-likes. But a) the protocol is so horrible, I’m not sure reinventing the wheel can be called a bad thing, and b) I want to cry once a week at least when using it. Why do my old messages not load today? Why does my message show as sent two weeks ago (!), but only arrived now (!) despite having sent plenty of messages both directions in between? Why are all of my messages marked as “can’t verify authenticity” on about half my devices, but not the other, a bug that has been open for YEARS with hundreds of complaints and pleas to at least reduce the danger-signaling indicator since it indicates “insecure!” to non-expert users, with zero maintained response? And this is just for myself, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck supporting matrix for friends & family. I mean, I am doing that, but fuuuuuuuuck thaaaaat.

Fluxer allows us to tell friends and family “here try this, it’s just like discord but no corporate bullshit!”, and they can open the app and go “oh yeah that is like Discord. Ok, sure, we can try using that instead”.

…oh. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

Looks like only their “small web” initiative is 100% self-indexed, and everything else is indeed a mixture of sources.

Oof.

I guess tue point still stands: the results are a lot better than plain Google, all the bullshit is stripped out and you get to customize your results in actually useful ways.

Still sad though.

I know it’s not the thing you likely want to hear, but… At this point, I’m glad I switched to a paid search engine (Kagi).

Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping them from enshittifying down the road. But at least for now (and hopefully the future) they are a great search engine.

They have their own index (so no relying on google/bing), and it actually works as I remember Google working 7+ years ago. Minus the ads, and plus a ton of flexibility permanently boosting/removing sites from your searches, auto-grouping/ignoring listicle-type articles in results, flagging sites as AI slop and punishing them for it,…

They even have a fediverse search “lense” that actually works really well to search Lemmy/mastodon/…

I just realized I sound like a paid shill. Sorry about that. I’m not.

It may be initially inconvenient, but you can choose a bank that offers 2FA/TAN beyond the smartphone app.

Not sure what healthcare apps you mean. There’s lots of categories, so won’t comment without clarification.

Same for employers tbh. Would love an example. (Besides: work apps can’t be forced on your private phone in most places.)

I live in “modern society” and do own a smartphone, but I’m aware that it’s a convenience, not a necessity.

I have multiple young-ish (30s) friends that don’t own a phone (not just smartphone; any phone), and basically all people I know above 80 years don’t own one either.

You can absolutely live a perfectly fine and good life without a smartphone. You’re just drawing the line where it’s convenient for you.

Or let’s put it in more familiar words…

[Owning a smartphone] is not “participating in society”, this is participating in, contributing to, and directly benefitting from the very thing they’re complaining about.

No, absolutely with you on this! I didn’t mean that I don’t understand because you can simply change the string (because agreed, most people don’t know and can’t be expected to know about this).

What I meant is: in 20 years of FF usage, I have come across ~5-10 broken sites (legitimate or UA, doesn’t matter).

So I can’t understand when people say they can’t use FF because it breaks so many sites.

So I have little understanding when people say they can’t use Firefox because pages break.

goes to prove the depths of the lack of technical illiteracy that the western world has been shepherded into.

Just to be clear: I don’t mean that I expect most people to know about user agent strings. I just cannot confirm the “so many sites don’t work!” complaints, flat out

Same here. I also can count on one hand the occasions where a site was broken in FF but worked in Chromium. And for a majority of those, that was intentional (aka no actual issue, switchtig the user-agent “fixed” the site). So I have little understanding when people say they can’t use Firefox because pages break.

Quick! Get this person a series A, B and C funding!

Yeah Librewolf is amazing. I dialed some if the ootb settings back for usability, but all the “new” stuff Mozilla adds is filtered right back out upstream, so I never even see it.

Seems broken? Certificate won’t load :(

But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!

Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.

They saved lifes.

Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

“Gabe the Diver”