I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Another hot tip: don’t refer to people as “normies.”

Nostalgia is really interesting in that it’s inherently bittersweet. It’s nice because it grounds us in a shared timeline and focuses on mostly positive aspects of some past point in time, but it’s also sad because it means thinking back fondly on a time that will never be again.

So maybe it’s the bitter half of that bittersweet feeling that you’re subconsciously adverse to? Either that or maybe your past/childhood was mostly negative or even traumatic? I’m no psychologist, so really I don’t know what I’m talking about.

This is exactly what I was going to say. The feed on Threads is absolutely abysmal. Just an endless stream of bullshit that I don’t want to see. That might improve in the future as they continue to update the app and its feed algorithms, but as of right now it’s pretty terrible at showing the user content that they’re interested in.

That’s really cool that someone thought to preserve this and put it on display in a museum. It’s like a modern historical artifact from the golden age of computing.

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

This was my first reaction to the article as well. The only one around me suddenly vanished a few months ago.

Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

I just took Mastodon for a spin only a week or so ago, and it felt much less active than most of the communities on here do. Just my anecdotal experience, though. I couldn’t find more than a handful of Twitter-migrated accounts on Mastodon that I cared to follow. There just wasn’t much happening on there that I’m interested in when I last checked. I’ll look again.

Oh hell yeah they are. I’m a tech enthusiast, myself. Don’t even get me started on Wednesdays because I’ll never stop.

Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.

This is sadly still the case and one of the main reasons I use Samsung phones today instead of Pixels. One Hand Operation + gives me more ergonomic and easy to use gestures while also playing nicely with third party launchers.

There’s just no way in hell I could use the pixel launcher as my daily driver. It’s just too simple and lacks the bare minimum customization options that I would need to be able to tolerate it.

It is already pretty great. The one thing that annoyed me enough to stop using it (for now) is that it displays two refreshing spinner animations whenever you pull down to refresh the feed. It’s a small thing, but it irked me enough to just stick to using the mobile app for a bit longer.

Adguard is the best option for system-wide, rootless ad blocking on Android IMO.

It’s the best because it also performs cosmetic filtering to reclaim the empty space that most other blockers leave behind after removing an ad from a web page. This makes web pages look much cleaner and is something that I value in any adblocker, mobile or otherwise. The free version works across any browser or embedded webview instance within apps, and the paid version filters all ads within apps as well. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Completely negligible impact on battery life as well.

One UI has been crammed with features for years now, many of which would be very nice to have in Pixel phones. Maintenance Mode would be good, I guess, but I can think of several others that would be far more beneficial to have merged into AOSP in some form.

For example, One Hand Operation + is the best implementation of gesture navigation in all of Android IMO. It’s quicker and more efficient than traditional gestures, more customizable, and plays well with third-party launchers. It’s one of the killer apps that makes it hard for me to consider anything other than a Samsung phone these days, especially since Google has made no attempts at fixing the wonky behavior of the native gesture navigation and third-party launchers.

Haha, wow. This is a perfect metaphor. Well done.

Thanks. I’ve tried all of the options suggested in this thread so far, and this one seems to be the best for search/discovery.