Also, there’s loops.video for reels, since Pixelfed only does images. Loops is running on the Pixelfed platform, and there appear to be plans to integrate the two at some point further down the road.

The biggest issue with Loops right now is that account verification emails seem to be sent out manually by the admins, so it can take a day or two to arrive after you initially create your account. And you can’t use the platform at all until that email arrives. So it’s not exactly the most friendly onboarding experience.

Not weird, but funny and unexpected.

I work in live entertainment. I deal with all kinds of shows, but the vast majority of them involve clients making/sourcing content to use in their shows. For instance, something as simple as a PowerPoint presentation on a projector, or music tracks for a dance show. So I use a lot of computers that don’t belong to me.

The funniest interaction I’ve ever had involved a speaker for a Black History Month presentation. The speaker brought his laptop in, with his slides all ready to go. So we plug it into the projector and he opens it up. As soon as he logs in, we’re both greeted to some hardcore porn playing in full screen. This lady was handling a whole 12 inches like a champ.

Luckily I had the projector blacked out, so it wasn’t catastrophic. It was only the two of us who saw it. What made it so funny was the fact that the dude wasn’t even ashamed of it. He took a beat, admired what was on the screen, gave a quiet “uh huh”, nodded solemnly, and then slowly moved his mouse cursor to close the browser tab. If he had acted flustered, it would have been a funny interaction. But the fact that he wasn’t in any rush to turn it off (despite the fact that I was sitting right next to him, waiting for him to boot up that presentation,) just had me fucking rolling.

Well yeah, it’s no secret that TikTok had a white supremacy problem. There was a researcher who discovered that they could make a brand new account and (by only interacting with certain types of content) get white supremacists on their For You page within 20 minutes. Algorithmic feeds are funny like that, because they just gauge engagement. The algorithm isn’t making any moral decisions on whether the engaging content is socially acceptable. For better or worse, it just goes “this person likes this content, so I’ll show them more.”

The SCOTUS decision was wild too, because it was a fucking 9-0 vote. The decision was unanimous. That’s a word that’s virtually never used to describe the SCOTUS or any kind of government vote. That unanimous decision made it perfectly clear that the government knows something we don’t, and that TikTok had them fucking terrified. My bet is on the genocide being much worse than even TikTok was showing, but TikTok was the only place you could see anything about it that didn’t have a massive “Israel is just helping them root out terrorists” spin.

I was actually searching for this exact idea like two weeks ago, and came up empty handed. Sometimes things do work out, I guess.

For the unaware, there’s an app called Prologue, which allows you to listen to audiobooks on a Plex server. Plex notably doesn’t have native audiobook support… The first-party PlexAmp app doesn’t support chapters, for instance. You can have the library remember your listening progress, but that doesn’t help much with a book audio file is 12 hours long. As a workaround, Prologue uses Plex’s service to access the files, then is able to read the chapter data from the m4a/m4b file.

That’s part of the issue; All of the “best” VPNs have stopped offering port forwarding. Mullvad and Proton are the gold standard for VPNs, but neither offer port forwarding. Private Internet Access still offers it, but they were bought out by a marketing company that was caught sneaking adware into their programs. PIA’s service is still good, but it relies on you trusting an ad company with your internet traffic. They claim to not save any logs or use your data, but they’ve also been found to be liars in the past with that adware scandal.

Torrents only work if at least one side has port forwarding enabled. And you don’t want to rely on other people having their ports open. In order to ensure you can actually connect to a seeder/peer, it’s best practice to enable port forwarding on your end.

The issue with this is that many VPN providers have stopped offering port forwarding services, because kiddy diddlers figured out a way to use port forwarding to privately share CSAM. So it has become difficult to torrent with a VPN, because pedos somehow manage to ruin everything.