Well I’d just tell them if I was recommending it to a friend or making a post like “follow me to mastodon” or whatever, and someone curious enough to find mastodon without a recommendation oughta be able to figure out an instance to join, mastodon.social is the first result when searching “mastodon” so it’ll probably get them just based on that.

Then they shouldn’t be able to decide to move to blusky either if they’re that paralyzed by choice.

And tbh I get it, I’ve been debating myself on just trimming my beard for like 6mo, and that much like “what masto instance should I join” is a preeetty consequence free decision, but imo the masto choice is even less consequential, you could make an acct on literally every instance that’ll take you if you wanted for free and lurk them and/or abandon them at will and remake another at will too whereas the beard has to grow for a while.

Also I gotta link this song since it’s so relevant lol.

Like I said “sure that makes it a bigger point of failure, but if it ever goes down just make one on whatever server most of your follows are on.”

As for the moderation issues, maybe, idk, but then again if you’re unhappy with the moderation by the time you get to that point “federation” is no longer a big scary word and you’ve likely found an instance you’d like to move to by virtue of just seeing it on your feed in .social, and on top of that masto lets you migrate accounts even, so it makes that a lot less painful to do.

I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear, but that was a joke. I am indeed aware of the existence of other email services.

Like Mastodon.social? Afaik it has been around since the beginning and is basically the “default” server unless you’re a “hacker” and you’re on infosec.pub or whatever, an edgy 4channer and you’re on poa.st, a SubGenius on “Bob’s” server dobbs.town, or one of the many pervert servers, or one of the asain servers I can’t read, but if you’re on one of those (for instance dobbs.town) you’re joining dobbs.town and mastodon is just there incidentally. Anyone else can just use .social and call it a day until they find out they’re really into plants.space or some specific thing.

Hell all the people I’ve gotten on masto that’s how I did it, “Ok make an acct on mastodon.social, great now lemme follow you what’s your name? Cool, see there I am! Oh I’m not on mastodon.social, I’m on dobbs.town, but we can still communicate like how I email your gmail from my protonmail, is normal. Now, there’s some servers you’re gonna want to block…” I don’t even tell them about federation until they’re already there, unless I KNOW the server they’ll want (like when I recommended my Discordian friend hop on discordian.social instead of mastodon.social.)

The real kicker is that none of their precious celebs they follow are on there, as you mention. The weirdos I talk to don’t care about that so it works out for me lol.

I honestly don’t get the whole “picking an instance is hard” thing, especially with masto. “Just use the default instance, mastodon.social, unless you have a reason not to,” bang problem solved. Then it’d become a larger point of failure but if it went down “well now that you sorta understand it make an acct on the server most of your follows were on,” bang 'nother problem solved.

Hell I have been diagnosed with executive function disorders and I can figure it out, it’s not as hard as people pretend, we’ve all done it with email since like '95. “It’s hard” is just twitter/bluesky propaganda!

On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means;

On email, you must pick a server, for some weird “server” reason, whatever that means;

It’s literally no different than deciding “should I go with Gmail or hotmail msn yahoo” fuck ok I guess there really is only one email provider now. Huh.

Yeah someone like me, who for the longest couldn’t remember what “mcbullshit” name they had for the burger I wanted, so I ordered “two of those dollar burgers” until they raised the price and I had to learn the word “McDouble,” ugh lol.

Maybe it’s someone who just absolutely can’t be bothered, like “let me get one of those whoppers or whatever the fuck, it’s all the same.”

Seriously missed an opportunity by not at least changing the cop to an Officer Jenny. Could have made the prisoner James too.

And as far as “epic tokens” I want die cast Gengar!

I didn’t know this had a show, I found a random VHS of The Lexx movie at a thrift store and watched that though, odd movie, but I keep watching it. I guess I need to download the show now!

As of audacity 3.0.3 (or was it 3.1.3? Shit it’s been a while…) it includes telemetry from the russian company that bought it. It was forked to oblivion and Tenacity is the best replacement fork.

Idk my sole interaction is through these headlines lol, I don’t have steam, and haven’t really even played anything since like RDR2 (well, not counting my GBC, I play with that all the time, currently playing Earthworm Jim (GB).)

Does this have anything to do with the other Steam related headline I read in a post earlier: " Games now have to disclose kernel level anticheat on steam?"

I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley. People can be creeped out by things that don’t creep you out, you know.

And what, you like junk mail that is 100% just a waste of resources in a world where we’re hurdling towards total climate annihilation? It could have just as easily been an email everyone ignored rather than a mailer everyone ignored.

Well, being read rather than said, I’d argue the tone is inferred by the reader.

And in any case, as a privacy focused individual, I’m not exactly crazy about either. I’m also not crazy about junk mail, so junk mail that implies it’s watching me in any form, I double don’t like. Y’all killing trees for this fucking bullshit?! No thanks.

“But the fact that you voted is pubic record” implies “we’re paying attention and could hassle in some form those who abstain if we choose.”

(Well, that’d be the argument for “threat” in the above text anyway. Imo threat or not it’s poorly worded leading to it being creepy, but that’s probably the extent of it. I doubt we’ll see any side round up and execute abstainers or some crazy shit like that.)

It is still kinda (I’m assuming there’s some record federally for verification or something, but…), just don’t tell anyone.

Anytime someone asks me I say I’m voting for A Turkey Sandwich, or Bugs Bunny, or “Your Mom,” etc, just something dismissive that sends the hint “that’s private, quit asking.”

Maybe, but in a good way. Do it!

Just to add for new users, find this info easily by typing “what to do after installing Fedora” into your search engine of choice, there’s many articles about it (and all of them have the same information for the most part).

Honestly the thing that helped me most with that sort of stuff was just subbing to r/linux (now would be c/linux but this was like 4y ago now I guess…fucking hell time flies huh?) and reading up on stuff/asking questions for a few months before I switched. There’s also linux4noobs (both c/ and r/) for asking specific questions, it’s slower on lemmy but still can offer help and honestly I should probably make a post here about it again to drum up awarwness. Finally I’d like to add that many times communities related to specific distros will be more help than general communities, if you have a question about Fedora for example it can be helpful to ask in c/fedora over c/linux sometimes.

Now as to your questions here, just to kinda boil it down, the main difference between distros is the prepackaged stuff that comes with it, and the package manager. Package Managers are basically your “app store,” this is where you’ll get most of the stuff you need, for the rest, Flatpak is a package manager available for all linux distros, and some things will have .deb or .rpm files on their website. The ones you listed are indeed distros, Lubuntu is too however.

DEs are basically your UI. If you ever changed the launcher on an android phone back when that was a thing, it’s basically the same concept. Fedora and FedoraKDE are the same distro with much of the same stuff under the hood, but Fedora (Gnome) is more maclike and FedoraKDE is more windowslike in terms of user interface. For this reason Ubuntu (Gnome) and Fedora (Gnome) almost feel more similar than Fedora (Gnome) and FedoraKDE. You can install any DE on any distro for the most part, but in the beginning I recommend picking a distro by considering the DE first and the package manager second, and everything else (long time stable vs bleeding edge updates for instance) third. You can always switch later for free, the only investment is time and maybe an external hdd/ssd for backups.

Someone will 100% come correct me and argue this lol, but I’m just trying to kinda explain it in “doesn’t already know about linux” terms (so hopefully I effectively did that at least lol). If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask here or on linux4noobs, and of course you can always try these distros out for yourself before installing them! You can use a USB drive and a program like Balena Etcher, Fedora Media Writer (iirc available on windows), or Rufus to create a live boot disk, boot into it instead of your OS, and play around. There’s typically no persistent memory so everything you do will be reverted when you shut down (and all saved files will be lost), but it’s just for trying it out before you “buy” it so to speak (just don’t click install unless you want to install, of course). There are plenty of guides for that out there, it’s actually a step in the installation process for most distros.