Heyo! Just another random who’s moving over from centralized social media to the Fediverse. Mastodon wasn’t too bad but I love anything like Reddit!

Games, anime, Japanese, food, and music are my loves. Fanfic beats food tho, I can read for hours instead!

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2025

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  • Felt that. Lemmy perfectly replicates (and improves) on the things I liked about Reddit. I don’t need or want an algorithm for this, because you can just subscribe to all the communities you love anyway.

    Meanwhile, Mastodon and Pixelfed are a struggle. Tagging is key since there’s no algorithm, but even after following like 50+ tags, I still don’t see exactly what I want in my feeds. I love fanart of games and anime, so I tried to pick pixelfed.art, but even then I don’t see much, and also realized a large amount of artists are on mastodon.art instead, and the federation struggles to show me people not on Pixelfed. Hell, both official and 3rd party clients sometimes break when viewing a non-pixelfed account page. You seriously have to work to curate a feed on these places that make you want to come back.

    I was never really a Twitter person, but I absolutely used Instagram and Pinterest a lot to look at art before I dropped them, so now I use Tumblr to not shut myself off entirely from fan content. So it’s not a matter of me not liking Fediverse services like Pixelfed and Mastodon, but them lacking the methods necessary to make viewing content easier.

    Don’t get me started on Misskey, the language barrier isn’t a problem for me as I am learning Japanese. But I feel a little lost with the UI, and once again, trying to find artists on other instances.



  • I was good at math and it was one of my favorite core subjects in school, so I know I’m a weirdo but… I never understood how people couldn’t understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.

    Obviously these problems are shitty engagement bait because they don’t use parentheses, but still, seeing people fuck up the fact that Multiplication AND Division occur at the same time, and then the next step is Addition AND Subtraction just stupefies me.

    Like, did you sleep through 4 years of elementary school to miss that fact??? Even in middle school pre-algebra teachers still did PEMDAS refreshers. I get that once I get out of college I’m probably gonna forget half the pre-calc shit I learned because I won’t need it, and I’m not being drilled on it everyday like people in school are, but PEMDAS is a fundamental and basic daily life skill that everyone should know…

    I really wish we gave a fuck about US education.


  • Whoa don’t come for Bluetooth like that. I like not having tangled wires and janky earbuds/headphones, especially because my clumsy ass used to snap the cords all the time by accident.

    I do agree though that we should get the choice to use headphone jack or bluetooth. I also miss having a jack since I have to use my charging port to connect to my car radio…

    Edit: My comment is an implication that I want phones with headphone jacks. I know that phones have headphone jacks and bluetooth. Why am I getting downvoted?



  • I’m not gonna lie, I stopped using Renshuu due to having other resources at hand and because it just looks so rough, but I think it’s great for a free resource. The fact that they offer a shit ton of vocab/grammar/kanji study sets for free and community built ones is reminiscent of Anki, and Renshuu also uses a SRS. Lots of customization for reviews and answer options.

    It’s certainly nowhere as eye-catching and addictive as Duolingo is, so beginners are probably more likely to give up than if they used Duolingo. But honestly, that site lost the point of what learning a language was supposed to be about anyway.

    Sometimes I feel I should pick it back up, but at this point I want to focus more on reading/watching content for practice/learning.


  • The banking app thing is unfortunate, but then I kinda realized that I don’t really need them anyway. I have all the features I need in browser, and text notifications set up for when I spend money.

    The wallet not working REALLY sucks, but if I look on the bright side that’s one less thing Google knows about me and my spending.




  • Outright banning them from schools is wrong imo, but if I had to put my phone in a locked box every class, I would’ve lived. I just think banning them outright is bad for needing to contact parents, especially for kids like me who had after school activities often.

    My only issue I had with HS teachers were the ones who bitched about people having headphones/earbuds in during class. Obviously I don’t have them in during instruction or group work as that would be disrespectful, but if you’re not at the front of the room talking and we’re doing individual work, I want to have my earbuds in. I had a study block teacher who was so fucking anal about phones and earbuds, when it is literally a fucking break class to do whatever the fuck you want/need to do.

    I just really like having music or background noise while doing work.

    EDIT: God this blew up.

    Well first off, I DEFINITELY remember not being able to contact my parents while at elementary school because they had out state phone numbers, so unless they were at home, I literally couldn’t contact them. Furthermore, if teachers get angry at kids simply going to the bathroom, you think they’re going to let us ask them to call our parents? Hell no.

    Also, how is putting earbuds in while someone ISN’T teaching disrespectful? If you’re not lecturing at the moment, then I’m putting my earbuds in. I don’t always need them to get work done, but I prefer to. It’s especially great if the class is being noisy, as I can put my music on to drown out the outside conversations. There are 30+ year old people who didn’t have phones growing up that like to play music while working.

    Please remember, most of those who oppose the introduction of phones to schools are part of the gen who decided to introduce them to us and bought the damn phones for the kids.


  • People have said Mullvad and I’d agree with them despite never having used it. Only thing it lacks is port forwarding, but if you don’t plan to torrent much that won’t matter.

    I use Proton, it works great and has port forwarding. A board member has created controversy (praised Trump), but the company is non-profit so there’s that.


  • Just tried it out yesterday and today, and thought it was pretty good! Compared the routes it showed me with Waze (GM data) and it showed similar/exact routes.

    For others who are curious, the only issues I noticed were:

    1. Has a stroke when trying to navigate to my house, seems to think there isn’t an exact road next to it, meanwhile organic maps shows and navigates to it perfectly fine. Seems to struggle with the exact location of a place, especially in a group of buildings.
    2. While navigating, if you tap the directions to see ahead, a bar comes up and shows you. However, when you try to dismiss this panel, it goes blank and stays on the screen.

    Other than that, seems great, has all the features Organic Maps does and more. Likely to be my permanent navigator app.




  • I was in high school when it first popped off so about 50-60% of teens (especially girls) were addicted/using it. I’ve never liked Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, or similar social media sites at all, so when it first came out I thought people were saying BeReal as in “B-reel”, as if it was some sort of site where you had to make an accompanying video to another one a friend made or some shit.

    But BeReal is still known, has 10M+ downloads on Google Play, in the top 100 for social apps at 89th.



  • Before they went all out nuclear with ads, promoted content, shops, and AI slop, I was using Pinterest a shit ton to look at fanart and memes (mostly stolen/reposted art, but real human art at least). I’d be on there for an hour or so every other day tbh, I liked making boards of my fixations and shit.

    Then the app went to hell a few years back and I ditched it, because the web version sucks, and I didn’t know about LibRedirect instances. Now I just don’t bother with the place anymore.


  • Novaling@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThe Privacy Iceberg
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    27 days ago

    LibRedirect + Libreddit instances is fantastic.

    Honestly, Reddit is one of the few services that can be redirected easily now. Invidious, Freetube, NewPipe, etc. is constantly being nuked by Youtube, and while Twitter redirects are still alive, they were dead for a short period, ProxiTok never works, nor does Proxigram instances…



  • Novaling@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlAndroid keyboard
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    30 days ago

    Felt that. I definitely miss having a kana flick keyboard on my phone, I prefer it to qwerty conversion. I especially needed a good keyboard cause I was using FOSS apps to do my Wanikani reviews on my phone (Smouldering Durtles).

    If someone does make something good, I’ll try to notify you, or make a notice in the Japanese learning communities on Lemmy 😉