regalia

Why do these deranged fucks do this

I haven't seen ads in years lol. I'm very aggressively adblocked on every layer possible. Even down to setting my router to use an adblocker dns as a final protection layer.

That's not how that works. There's special access to some apps that get unencrypted right at boot. That's how your phone can reboot in middle of the night and your alarm will still go off despite you doing the initial unlock. Find my device also has that ability.

See the "ACTION_LOCKED_BOOT_COMPLETED" permission for how it works.

Paying for a search engine is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard lol. DDG is just better and I question what you use to guage better results, especially since you already spent money and are already susceptible to bias.

I just search ddg and get my results. I don't get those affiliates, top 10 lists, or whatever you're talking about. I just get good results, and if I don't then I try using Google.

Another tip that basically works with all search engines. Mark a word in "quotes" to have results require that word in the page. Helps you narrow results down if you need something specific.

Most self hosting isn't even needed but it sure as hell is satisfying

Sure, if you act like the mastodon users who are holier-than-thou preachy, yet are the harmful capitalists that create the problems they preach against. They're toxic. Not to right wingers, but to other left wingers. If you're new to these politics outside of America, I'm not right wing btw, I'm more left then they are which is why I'm not capitalist.

I never felt it was too complicated, though the people unfamiliar with decentralization definitely get confused by the process of on boarding. The lack of content is still the issue for a lot of reasons. Mastodon's search is straight up broken. Also it doesn't show federations of users you're following, it can definitely extend it's social graph a lot more. They intentionally nerf it for dumb reasons thinking it somehow marginalizes people, it makes no sense.

Lemmy does do this and is why it feels a lot more exciting on Lemmy. It's also why I pretty much abandoned Mastodon since most of my time is on Lemmy at this point.

Well then ask yourself who's doing the manipulation? The instance owner? The open source devs who make the engagement algo?

The open source devs are going to be in line with keeping it transparent and healthy while still keeping it entertaining, so there's already checks and balances right there to prevent it becoming an issue. There is no venture capitalists to corrupt it either, so there's no incentive to make it malicious and the community gets to tweak it to make it balanced. That also means anyone can check to see how it works. Also they can add options for the user to tweak it.

If you don't like it, then the current option of new posts/boosts in order will always be enabled, so this would be a completely optional separate feed and not affect you if you don't like it. No need to police others and decide they don't deserve to have this implemented as an optional sort, and it's not replacing your current feed.

If a instance somehow maliciously manipulates the algo, then that's the beauty of decentralization right there, you're free to swap. The problem with other social media algos is they're corrupted by venture capitalist and they're centralized so you have no say in how it works. Both these issues don't apply to Mastodon.

This is literally what I'm talking about. You say that and then wonder why Mastodon doesn't catch on, yet every other successful social media does this. It's already evident that people don't want this by the huge numbers dropping off mastodon.

Nothing wrong with that. The Masotodon server can pool the popular/trending posts and push them to your feed if it's relevant, aka if you follow accounts that follow, or follow a hashtag. It already has to access your information to have the feed work at all obviously, personality just means it makes more complicated decisions from the information is already has.