I have used both in the past, but now use neither of them, have been exclusively a KDE Plasma user for several years by now and no longer feel like trying much different.

GNOME 2 was the first DE I ever used on GNU/Linux, so MATE has a nostalgic feel to me. I do not think Xfce is very radically different from it in its functionality, although the default configuration is somewhat different. This is really mostly a matter of personal taste.

A US Senator is part of the government.

Fortunately in the US I trust that their First Amendment has some teeth. If that were happening in most other countries, I’d be seriously worried that this senator might succeed with his evil plans.

but it was trash at loading html websites

as opposed to websites written in excel 2003 format or what

I follow several news organizations, bloggers, activists there. For example you can get Linux news from https://techhub.social/@LinuxToday or posts from Richard Stallman’s blog at https://mastodon.xyz/@rms or the EFF is https://mastodon.social/@eff – of course those aren’t the only accounts I follow, just a sample of ones you might be interested in that have recently posted things.

You can also follow hashtags on Mastodon, that sometimes helps me find accounts to follow. Recently I have however been unfollowing more accounts than I’ve been newly following because my feed was getting spammed with too many things that I didn’t find very relevant.

ETA: you can also follow https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows if you are very desperate for random suggestions for things you could follow

A Mastodon user I follow recently posted that there are 3 types of laws. I think that is an interesting framework.

What Pakistan is doing here is definitely a “power law”.

and this is a bad thing how, convincing people in the Soviet sphere that the US is better in every way???

Things like that aren’t a feature of the terminal emulator, but of the shell. Try to find out which shell you’re using on Android, maybe try using that one on desktop too.

I found that on old forums I did get to know the people regularly posting on them quite well over time (and they got to know me). On reddit and lemmy not so much, or do you have any idea about anything I’ve posted before (because I don’t know anything about you).

The main thing I would like to know is why so many people nowadays want a microblog platform, whether it is X or Bluesky or Mastodon, and why community-based platforms like Lemmy are getting relatively little attention in comparison.

Is it just that these people weren’t seriously online before the rise of microblogs? They didn’t start out with phpBB-style forums, so don’t miss their existence and think that individuals having followers is the normal state of the Internet? I’m genuinely not super sure what’s going on.

Wait, what? Which parts of this are satire now? I read the Onion piece that Global Tetrahedron was purchasing InfoWars, but this is a Guardian story saying The Onion is purchasing it? I’m a bit confused.

I wrote (not only, but some) more intelligent things on the Internet when I was a teenager.

In the 2000s I thought that due to more and more people being on the internet, stories like this would be very common in the future, not just for the government, but private entities too.

In reality: Most things that happen at most workplaces are not interesting enough to leak, and most people do not want to risk their careers for something like this. So it’s still relatively rare.

no, I’m very certain I’ve never seen one, this article certainly doesn’t have one

Last decade it was “destroyed”

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/21/these-are-a-few-more-of-my-least-favorite-things/ point 2

WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin. I suspect you already know about it.

Some months ago I read about something called “Ghost” which either already has or is planning to add ActivityPub integration.

If there were a universal answer to this, there wouldn’t be any others.

I myself currently use Debian (testing), have for some years now, but I have used other distros in the past too.

honestly any that wants to leave (by a democratic referendum) and doesn’t cause any exclaves or enclaves to exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map

ideally donations like lots of other FOSS projects