Update (10 Feb 2025): I only wanted to add some screenshots and correct some typos, bad language and a factual error (again, I'm not a programmer and know little to nothing about PHP in particular) but just a few hours ago a long-time pixelfed.social user got banned for highlighting that Pixelfed suffers from many open issues persisting for years. If my account should be gone without me posting that I deleted it myself, you may take a guess what possibly could be the cause of this.
Keeping the mandatory-by-unwritten-rules-about-blogging introduction as short as possible, let's just kick this off by my failed attempt at getting most of my stuff, particularly my post, off pixelfed.social after having learned more about dansup and why he's a server admin AND dev no one should trust for as long as his behavior remains unpredictable.
I, not even a coder but somewhat familiar with system administration, digged through the project's GitHub repository and not only did I discover it's lacking features but also strange configs and a single commit that is bordering on being intentionally misleading. Account migration in particular thus is broken by design.
Update (28 Jan): I tried to at least get my shots off Dan's server but it turns out that account migration has been broken since January, 2024, and Dan has not even reacted to it to this very day. Yeah, fuck Pixelfed.
With the next “big migration” and dansup's plans to turn Pixelfed into a carbon copy of Instagram, there's no point in me continuing to use anything relying on Pixelfed. It was fun while it lasted and I want to thank my ~70 followers for not only granting me some inspiration and some new insights but also assisting me at determining species new to me.
I also just learned that dansup is... quite the guy people should trust, no different from Automattic's Matt Mullenweg. Miss me with that BS, I'll keep my shots to myself again.
Due to cock.li – don't act surprised, they also host normal names! – overhauling their whole service, I have a hard time telling whether transmission of incoming and outgoing mail occurs at all, given the last mail I received came in just two days before they announced their “red alert”.
Because I don't want to leak my private mails, I decided to make some of my chat details public (most of those already are listed on my Geminispace capsule):
If you're cool, I may tell you one of my private email addresses but you'll have to use any of those services above or reach out to me on Mastodon or Bluesky first (Pixelfed's DM's have been broken for months, sorry).
Minor update (04-01-2025): magda(@)airmail.cc now is compatible with Delta Chat!
If you've discovered my tiny blog by meeting my Mii via StreetPass (NetPass), I just want to mention that I would have included any other social media account of mine if it weren't for the character limit. I'm active on the Fediverse – Mastodon and Pixelfed – and on Geminispace (proxy link can be found in “Socials”). I also got an account on Bluesky which I'm barely active on but created in case some people don't find the Fediverse appealing. If you want to see my media library and perhaps even download some software or a manual, I donate my stuff to the Internet Archive; a separate repo on my GitHub will be created with stuff rejected by IA in the future.
On this day in 2014, I was using my mother's Fujitsu computer as usual. Windows XP went into a sudden BSOD and immediately revoked the product activation, effectively locking us out entirely due to the original Recovery Disc having disappeared (we either lost it or one of my uncles, who did the initial setup but has a habit of never returning anything he borrows, kept it).
After installing antiX and encountering the same thermal issues I witnessed on both Devuan and Salix, alongside a desktop experience much worse than on both, there wasn't a point in testing the remaining distributions targeting old 32-bit machines. It became apparent that all distributions still under active development either long abandoned optimizations for netbooks or never offered them in the first place. What made this realization particularly frustrating were quite recent forum posts on Reddit and other sites still recommending distributions such as Lubuntu, which are WAY too heavy on such devices not in terms of RAM or the type of storage device (“install a SDD” is almost always being recommend by those people for some reason) but of CPU demands. All tested distributions, in fact, performed smoothly, however my netbook eventually started to smell like melting chips and, because sensor readings turned out to be largely useless, I had to use my (even less reliable) hands to estimate this machine's CPU temperature, which were MUCH higher than all of my notebooks constantly reporting temperatures above 48°C.
After a week of testing all kinds of Linux distributions, I settled with Devuan and Salix for the final test. I initially planned on writing just one post for both tests, however Devuan managed to be THAT weird (and frustrating) that this post would have gotten too long and convoluted.
Spoilers: I'm close to losing my sanity halfway through this and it may or not be entertaining to read.
Silly me for having made all my Linux partitions too small for VM tests, so there was no way around going back to my old setup on Windows 10. Right off the bat, I was greeted with a BSOD, ironically foreshadowing how most virtual tests eventually turned out and forced me to improvise.
