Ragebait here is saying you like Windows for its open design.

If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.

On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.

On Lemmy, there’s no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it’ll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there’s a bunch of false leads.

No, but there’s fragmentation of communities. Instead of one central place for the community to form, you have to look at dozens of locations, where there may be a sub, but it may have 1 post in the last 4 months.

I think this is an artifact of what’s oddly the biggest weakness of the fediverse: decentralization.

When I used reddit back pre-api stuff, my front page was 100% niche subs I’d subscribed to, but those niches have trouble le growing here because there’s so many instances.

I was super active in the scuba subreddit. Here on Lemmy, there’s several scuba groups that tried to form, but none of them stuck because they were all on different instances instead of one central location where everyone could work together to make the community.

As a result, most of us haven’t been filtering out 99% of Lemmy because the 1% where we’d be active doesn’t exist. It’s like joining reddit and having your frontpage be /r/all. It’s a shitty experience that g9ves a lot of weight to political posts.

Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.

The last thing we need is more barriers to entry. People have hundreds of SMS /MMS contacts they’vebuilt up over decades. You can’t expect people to say “fuck all that” and start over from scratch.

And you also WANT verification unless you want some bot setting up an account with my phone number so they can scam people pretending to be me.

It really sounds like your issue with Signal is it’s not the correct service for your use. It’s like declaring a wrench bad because it’s not good at driving nails.

It’s meant to replace people’s text messaging apps with .i imal barriers to entry. People’s existing SMS/MMS contacts aren’t stored by user account names, but by phone number.

When I added Signal to my device, I was able to open up my existing contacts and go.

My Galaxy Note 8 is a backup phone. It was a flagship when it launched, yeah. But even so, it’s 7 years old, the last update for it was over 2.5 years ago, and it’s still chugging along like a champion.

Smartphone design is mostly a solved problem. Take today’s screens and processors and throw in a few features from the past (removable storage, IR blaster, and headphone jack) and you have a 10-year phone.

I used to get a new phone every year because phone got way better each generation.

My phone is top-tier from 2021 (Z Fold 3), and I have had zero temptation from the newer versions. All they really have is faster processing, but since all apps are designed to run well on budget phones from 5 years ago, there’s no reason to upgrade.

I’ve been using aCar for over a decade. It’s owned by Fuelly now, but all the cloud stuff is optional.

I keep track of my mileage, fuel, maintenance, etc. I can take pictures of receipts, make notes, etc. It’s pretty easy, and I can save local backups of the data or have it sync to Dropbox or onedrive.

My hatred of soccer isn’t due to FIFA. I’m just American and it’s one of our more benign hatreds.

Yeah, parking really kills it.

In Houston, by the time you’ve paid for the parking and the light rail ticket you’ve spent more than you would paying for extra gas and for a space in the parking garage at your destination.

So public transit ends up costing more AND adds 30-60 minutes to the commute, plus a 5-block walk in 115°. Why wouldn’t I take my air-conditioned recliner?

$140 for 30 meg that’s usually about 8, unless the neighbors are using it, then I’m lucky to get a 480p stream…