I can definitely see name-collisions being an issue, where communities on different instances have the same community “ID”, but aren’t actually about the same thing. I’m still overall in favor of the basic idea though.
Honestly, owning up to it being a selfish decision deserves some respect. I’m a big proponent of free expression and avoiding censorship, but I took a gander at the kinda stuff they got over there and…
It’s not even the views they hold that’s my main problem. It’s really that they’re just so needlessly rude and aggressive, and as you pointed out, they seem to be a lot more censorship happy than here anyway. I would be more sympathetic to them if they were less censorship happy themselves, and if they were less mean.
I do want to stress that I hope you keep the number of blocked instances to a minimum, since I feel that it would be better if the Lemmy software had better tools for users to control what they block for themselves better, and also maybe just having “default” blocklists that users can disable, to keep the new-user experience nice, but yeah for that particular instance, I can’t be too mad about it.
Do you know about Flatseal? It’s an application that lets you manage flatpak permissions. Until the portals system is fully working, weakening the sandboxing using Flatseal is what a lot of people do to make the apps work correctly.
Also, if you use KDE, the settings app has flatseal-like functionality built in.
In my view this isn’t the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they’ll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don’t actually care too much if Reddit dies. I’m happy as long as there’s a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
The line between IDE and text editor is kinda blurry nowadays anyway. I don’t know that much about Geany, but many of the text editors I’ve used were basically full IDEs, except that the IDE features were opt-in.
Currently I use VScodium as my editor, and I’ve been happy with it. I hear a lot of good things about Kate too, and as a KDE user, I feel like I should try it some time. Kate to me looks like the same spirit of text editor as Geany. Maybe if you’re comfortable with that style of editor, give it shot.
The 2 editors that have really been catching my eye lately have been Helix and Lapce. I think it’s really cool that Helix went with a Kakoune style “selection → action” system instead of the normal vim style “action → selection”. I think Lapce is trying to be a similar style of editor to Vscode, with simple IDE features by default, but then an extension sytem to expand that. Maybe an editor like that would be approachable to you. Although unlike Helix, Lapce seems to be less production ready for now, so maybe wait on that.
For now you could of course just try VScode (or VScodium if you’re like me and want open-source software) since that’s a popular one right now.
Fedora has a pretty good amount of software in the repositories, so a lot of the time that’s enough. When it’s not, flatpak with flathub have most gui software covered, and outside of that, if we’re talking about terminal or command line stuff, most of those have their own custom way to install them, or they just have self contained binaries that you can put in ~/.local/bin/.
I haven’t run into many issues with flatpak like it sounds like you have, so that really covers a lot of it for me honestly.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do myself. I’m really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I’m almost always a lurker, but I’m really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!
I’m really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It’s a really cool idea!
For anyone who’s interested in an alternative, check out https://codidact.com . It’s much smaller right now, but it’s open-source and the community is nice.
I have an account, but I don’t really use it much. Not because I don’t like it, but because I don’t have much to say really. I’m more of the lurker type.
The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The “main” homeserver is matrix.org, but it’s recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there’s no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.
The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of “reference implementation” so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io
There’s some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don’t have to worry about those much at first.
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet’s evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a “new beginning” for communities on the internet.
That’d be cool, but just a simple reminder in case not, that you can simply make an account on that instance. There’s no limit to what instances you’re allowed to have accounts on or anything like that, so you can always do that.
Still for cohesion I get wanting it all together.