Scrobling used to be huge back in the day of mp3s and last.fm practically invented it.There are also alternative APIs implementing the same idea. Unfortunately for them they never caught up on the age of streaming.

Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren't many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I'd outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it's not lacking too much in software.

Unfortunately what's going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. "We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue".

It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I've been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We've been using it for about 5 years now and it's chugging along. It's simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server's point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It's perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.

Here's a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).

Yes Conversations is still a paid app on Play Store. The F-Droid version also doesn't support Google cloud notifications so some message notifications will go missing occasionally. For Android there's also Quickly which is a Conversations fork and aTalk which works OK but reminds me of 90s Windows software. It's still quite usable though. Honestly Conversations is totally worth the money if only for the amount of effort gone into modernising the platform which also a testament to its extensibility.

Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

It's trivial to self host. I'm running a server on a small VPS for the family. Best part is they don't even know they are running XMPP, just installed Conversations and that was it.

Yes, I feel "social media" (or whatever this engagement driven, algorithmically fed hellscape can be called) is driving up the responses. We know, by now, how adversely social media affect the mental well-being of children, being bombarded all the time by the fantastic lives of plastic "influencers". Add to that cyber-bullying 24/7 which is now common, peer pressure for "green and blue bubbles" and a ton of other nonsense you can probably understand how people in a age bracket that there's chance of being parents might feel negatively about today's technological status quo.

You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It's especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.

I've been using RSS since before Google Reader was a thing. It's a fantastic way to monitor new papers in journals as almost all journals have been providing a feed since forever. I could go with a self-hosted option but I just ended up using Inoreader although I will probably migrate again. They used to have some entry level plans (they call it supporter plan) at some €20/yr but it looks like they are no longer available for new users.