IdleSheep

Agree with you, OsmAnd is practically unusable for me due to the ancient UI. I hated it every time I used it.

I found Organic Maps to be a decent modern alternative. It's open source and uses data from openstreetmaps as well, but it's a million times less cluttered.

You might not have heard of the formats but you've definitely listened to them. For example, Youtube has only served audio in aac and opus for years now. Most instant messaging apps also use opus during calls to reduce bandwidth usage. And those are just some big examples. Basically almost any online service has dumped mp3 in favor of aac and opus since they're better in every way (in the sense that they have better quality at the same bitrate as mp3, so you can reduce the filesize by a lot and still preserve the same audio quality)

I watched it for the first time last year without knowing anything about it and, as someone who loves to nerd out about anything linguistics related (am translator, for context), I cannot describe how gleeful I was that such subjects had center focus in a big blockbuster like that. Obviously the other aspects of the movie were amazing as well and the story got me very emotional by the end, but I will never shut up about how interesting and important that translation/communication aspect of the movie was.

As someone who owns a digital audio player I can give some reasons:

• Since most phones don't come with headphone jacks anymore, it's nice to have a device you can just plug your wired headphones into. It also means headphone jack inclusion is no longer a factor when choosing a smartphone.
• Better audio quality depending on the DAC inside the device.
• Expandable storage. Most DAPs let you insert one, some even two micro sd cards. No need to stream anything, plus you have space for lossless files.
• No need to worry about data/wifi, your music is always there ready to listen offline.
• Some DAPs are really small (Shanling M0 for example), making them more portable than a phone for a lot of use cases.
• More headphone compatibility. A lot of higher end DAPs support more than a 3.5 mm jack. The Fiio m11 plus for example has a 4.4 and 2.5 balanced output jacks in addition to the standard 3.5 mm.
• Higher power amps to power hungry headphones. A smartphone can't power say a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s, a DAP can because it comes with a preamp (not all though, depends on the specs).
• Dedicated physical buttons. A touchscreen will never compare to controlling playback with physical buttons.

Though I will say, even as someone who owns one, unless you're really into carrying your music library with you it's generally not worth it. But they are nifty little gadgets and new ones come out every year to innovate the space.

It's similar to an e-reader as others pointed out. Sure, you can read on a phone/tablet as well but it's nice to have a device that's purpose built for one thing and does it really well. The same applies to a digital audio player. Yeah you can (and most people are fine with) play music on your smartphone, but a dedicated device does add some nice QoL to the experience.

Doesn't Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.

And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.

The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform's outreach.

This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.

When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.

And that's if the accounts posting aren't all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.

So glad more people are leaving it. There's nothing to gain from it anymore.

You actually tricked yourself into believing this isn't all about shutting down competition to American companies or stopping people's (especially young people's) power to disseminate even remotely left leaning views that could gain traction and threaten the oligarchs.

I mean even the politicians who back this bill state as much, so I'm not sure why you think this is about national defense. American citizens are just under as much threat as before, but now they have one less way to express themselves. Ain't that great. /s

Over simplified, because Romani are usually nomad, they live in moving settlements and don't typically integrate much wherever they settle in. A lot of the hatred they receive also stems from these settlements being illegally set up in private/public property, as well as how they result in a lot of trash being dumped everywhere. There is also an issue with Romani criminality (stealing, damaging property, and sometimes there are even shootouts between different Romani families which result in casualties).

There is also a perceived notion that governments do not want to deal with these problems, which further fuels the hatred against the Romani as they're seen as criminals who get away with everything.

The truth of course lies somewhere in the middle. Most Romani are not bad people if you take the time to know them, but there is definitely a lot of toxic cultural norms being perpetuated by leaders of many Romani families, which doesn't help with clearing the stereotypes, and with very little to no integration between the Romani and the cultures they are in, it's hard to get rid of the animosity.

Wow, you've really succinctly put it best! Being a European myself, this is how I constantly feel when I hear racist shit in my daily life (mainly from family).

It's like, people here just can't even fathom that what they're saying is racist, that they're racist, because to them what they're saying is just a simple fact of life that everybody accepts. They don't show open animosity towards minorities or throw racial slurs like you'd see more in America (though there is definitely some of that here too don't get me wrong), but it's a very casual, low-key form of racism where folks comment on X group of people all being one way and no one batting an eye for example.

And if you so much as suggest they're racist, or the country they're in has or had issues with racism and other issues of oppression, a lot will legit fight you tooth and nail over it because they can't handle the notion of it.

It's really freaking weird and took me a lot of time to be conscious of it myself, since I grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude.

And it's not just right-leaning people doing this. Some minorities like the Romani are openly discriminated by just about everyone across the political spectrum, the degree just varies. And then based on the country you'll typically see a lot of Xenophobia towards the bigger migrant groups.

As a European myself, never mention the Romani people to anyone here unless you want to hear the most degenerate, racist diatribe you can conjure up in your mind. (half hyperbole half not)

Baraag is way more permissive than misskey.io and it gained a pretty bad reputation in the past because of that, plus it essentially advertises itself as a safe haven for lolicon art and primarily focuses on that, so that's why it's on many block lists.

misskey.io is just a generalist Japanese instance (which is why many Japanese artists easily hop on it). It's also the biggest misskey instance and is run by the main developer, so it's usually not blocked by default because most people use it.

Defederating from misskey.io would be like defederating from mastodon.social. Some will do it but it's not the default stance afaik.

Misskey is like mastodon so you can just go to another misskey instance.

But if you're talking about the misskey.io instance, it's not that defederated from my experience (the 3 instances I'm on aren't defederated from it).

The instance simply follows Japanese law so whatever Japan allows they allow and whatever Japan forbids they forbid (which is why censoring genitals is also mandatory in that instance lol). It's not like it's some nazi cesspool or anything like that.