Kobo e-readers are 1-to-1 alternatives that allow you to easily transfer epubs or PDFs to it with a USB cable.

I haven’t tried it myself, but everything I’d read and seen of using it for that purpose seemed to indicate it was not terribly intuitive to use, despite being very powerful.

Edge, opera, brave, they’re all chromium based.

The only independent browsers still standing are Safari and Firefox (and its forks).

I would highly recommend The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. There’s an excellent audio book version available for free on Archive.org.

It’s very well written classic sci-fi.

Some others that I thoroughly enjoyed:

• Starwolf - Edmond Hamilton
• The Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
• The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones
• Gunner Cade - Cyril Kornbluth & Judith Merrill
• The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• Phaid the Gambler - Mick Ferran
• The Dispossessed - Ursula Le’Guin

I would suggest that it is as complex as you wish to know.

My explanation above is not truly required to effectively use a federated platform, in the same way that most email users don’t actually know how precisely email works, and would find an in-depth explanation of it very complex.

All someone needs to know about email is that they must login to their email host provider, and that every user they might send email to has a unique name, and possibly a different host name after the @ symbol.

In the same way, the only thing someone needs to know about this platform, is they must login to the same place they signed up to (their host provider). They can then use it in a similar way to reddit. They might wonder why usernames or communities have different names after the @, but it doesn’t actually impede using the platform to not understand.

If anything, that might make it easier to use than email.

They each use a different backend, and their web UI’s are designed with their own unique backend in mind.

There is Photon, a third-party web UI/client that may someday be compatible with both Lemmy and Piefed, but currently only properly supports lemmy.

As far as I know, Piefed, Lemmy, and Mbin essentially are just displaying the data made available from ActivityPub in different ways, like the comment aggregation for crossposts.

Lemmy is a software that people can host on their computer, and many people doing that form what is essentially a bunch of mini-reddits that can talk to each other to create one big platform.

Piefed is trying to fulfill the same goals as Lemmy, and is even fully compatible with Lemmy, so someone hosting a piefed server on their computer can join in with all the Lemmy servers, and to the Lemmy people, it appears to them like any other Lemmy server.

But underneath everything, the code base is entirely different. The commonality they share, along with mastodon, is they all use ActivityPub, which is the standard that allows them to all communicate and be compatible with each other, just like there’s an email standard.

Kbin (now Mbin) is yet another Lemmy compatible software that you can host on your computer, but it also tried to implement features that make it more like mastodon (twitter-like), so it can act both like reddit, with threads and comments and communities around single subjects, or be like mastodon and work with hashtags and following individuals instead of communities, like a microblogging website.

They also use different interfaces, but it’s only visible to people who directly use that server; to others who access it from their home server, it’ll adopt the look of the software their home server is using.

So as an example, you are using Lemmy since your home server is Lemmy.ml. if you visit a community hosted on a piefed server from within your Lemmy, like !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social, it’ll look like any other Lemmy community.

But if you directly go to that piefed server by going to https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube you’ll see it from the piefed interface, since you’re accessing that piefed server directly.

All of three of the different federated Reddit-like softwares are intercompatible, so they all make up one big network.

I’m not German, but I would know better than to praise a pick from the AfD.

The Proton CEO thought that the party taking bribe after bribe from oil companies to Tech-bros, and which removed the FTC chairwoman that was bringing anti-trust cases against amazon and publicly criticized Google’s monopoly, would somehow install a good, pro-competitive and consumer rights advocate?

If he genuinely believed that, then he’s either wildly out of the loop in one of his company’s largest markets (which I’ll grant as possible, CEOs can be pretty out of touch with reality), or a fool.

This praise is, itself, ass-kissing the orange, likely in the hopes of getting in the good graces of the administration.

This article shows what happened: https://techstory.in/proton-mail-faces-backlash-over-claims-of-political-neutrality-amid-ceos-praise-for-republican-party/

Unless something has changed, I believe Windscribe also allows port forwarding.

AirVPN does as well, but as they are based in Italy, I think they may have to comply with the new Italian VPN anti-piracy law enacted there.

Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)

To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.

Seconding the piefed recommendation. It’s much lighter to host than Lemmy, and has some nice user facing features that Lemmy lacks, which you can read more about here (scroll down to comments):

https://slrpnk.net/post/24141955/16757434

There’s also freetube, which didn’t require making an account last time I used it.

https://freetubeapp.io/

I think they may have misspelled it. Try !smolweb@slrpnk.net

Yes, but a user would need to be experienced enough to know how to uninstall the previous desktop environment components they don’t want, otherwise their application menu would have both DE’s applications (2 file managers, photo viewer’s, text editors, terminals, etc), which can feel a little cluttered.

The gnome people have no profit motive to encourage enshittification.

Gnome 3 was sluggish when it came out, but it’s perfectly fine nowadays. Just avoid it if you don’t like the workflow.

I’d recommend MX Linux KDE edition. The new version based on Debian 13 should be released this month.

It’s basically just Debian with some added convenience utilities to make life easier, one of which was an nvidia driver installer that works a treat. Great little distro.