I agree, the whole paradigm of activitypub instances being treated as little local web communities that can interact with one another from their respective websites in limited ways is very flawed if the goal is for it to catch on as an alternative to existing social media experiences.

Although that’s not to say that paradigm is innately bad though, since it works fine for more tech-savvy people and is basically what hexbear has and works well with, but it’s a total non-starter for the average social media user.

Personally I think that something along the lines of what you said is the only way activitypub will ever be able to exit the niche space it currently occupies. The user should not have to learn how it works whatsoever. Ideally the process of getting a friend to join should sound more like “Install this app or go to this website(which is a server-agnostic frontend), click register and pick a service provider(not an ‘instance’)” rather than “Find an instance, go to its website(which all look slightly different), create an account, and then inevitably end up with a disjointed mess of browser tabs on different instances because you clicked ‘View the full profile on the original instance’ while trying to find people to follow.”

I’m not a developer, but it really feels like the fediverse movement is sort of trying to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways. Also sorry for the long rambling reply, I’m bored at work.

obs, flameshot/sharex, and 7-zip

vlc media player hat

pipepipe and rimusic is what i use. youtube in the browser is fine too, if you disable that “open in the youtube app” popup (firefox for android with ublock origin addon is what i use, although i have experienced some regressions with the ad-blocker not working after youtube updates something, but ublock is usually on top of it and fixes stuff quickly).

marx cannot be telling anyone to touch grass

also syncthing, if you’d like to synchronize a directory to act like a shared folder and be identical on both devices

KDE Connect

nixcon north america was sponsored by anduril https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/

I think NixOS would stand to benefit a lot by taking inspiration from openSUSE’s YaST system configuration tool. I think that if NixOS had a well supported graphical interface for creating and managing the system config, it would become so much more accessible to a very wide range of users who never would have given it a try otherwise, which in turn would bring in tons of new users and developers who will want to improve nixpkgs, etc.

you can install emudeck on any regular linux distro

if you can’t get xwiimote working for you, there’s also cwiid. http://abstrakraft.github.io/cwiid/

with dolphin specifically, you don’t want to connect the wiimote through the bluetooth interface, as dolphin has it built in to handle wiimotes already; see https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/configuring-controllers/#Real_Wii_Remote

my personal wishlist would just be a proper homeserver and the typical home theatre stuff like a nice big screen, speakers, etc.

in a broader sense of how the ecosystem would be improved, i’d say more open source projects and solidarity in general. currently the worst, yet most common sort of piracy is people searching “watch blank online free” and clicking the shady websites full of junk ads, popups and malware just to see a shitty heavily compressed buffering version with baked in subtitles and stuff. piracy should be for the people, not for profit; lowering the amount of technical hoops you need to jump through to get to the good accessible media by having simple, free, and open tools would help a lot.

https://git.bubu1.eu/Bubu/android-calculatorpp

cool acronym have you tried conducting your research anywhere besides urban dictionary? needlessly perpetuating the casual use of a term of evidently racist origin is an affront to the collaborative spirit of free software that allows us to behold such beautiful configurations and customizations

Maggie Mae Fish, Thomas Flight, Captain Disillusion