I like Levar Burton Reads. His voice is so soothing. You can pick a story with a topic you are less interested in for nighttime listening since there are plenty to choose from.

Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.

I listen to things in my car a lot where the only forward button on that interface is a skip to the next episode button. I’d have to pull out my phone and open the app on my phone to find the skip forward 15s button.

For reading news, I recommend getting a tablet and a case with a stand to prop it up at a comfortable reading angle. It’s easier to read with aging eyes than a smartphone. It will still have the accidental long press problem, but icons need to be dragged a longer distance to be rearranged so there is a better chance it will snap back into the right spot after an accidental long press. Someone needs to make an elderly-proof launcher that has a way to lock things in place on the home screen and disable that long press there. Maybe someone already has? I haven’t played with alternative launchers in years.

I use Blokada 5 on my android phone which is a free, phone-wide ad blocker that runs as a local VPN based DNS service that blocks spam address DNS requests. They do have a newer version, 6, that’s cloud based instead of a local VPN and requires a subscription and I haven’t tried that out. Maybe that one is easier to reconfigure remotely if something important inadvertently gets blocked. The only reason I never tried it is I have a very limited income right now as a full-time caregiver. I have used Blokada 4 and then 5 for several years now.

My pi-hole on my home network is also pretty set it and forget it and protects all of my mother-in-law’s devices while she is connected to the Wi-Fi, which is most of the time since she only ever wants to leave the house for doctor’s appointments or occasionally to eat out. I bought a cheap orange pi zero to set the pi-hole up on and it lives next to the router. My MIL is a 70+ year old gamer so she is a little bit more tech savvy than your average elderly person, but she constantly falls for ads and terrible tabloid clickbait that shows up in her news app.

I kind of want to try setting up an RSS app for her with more curated news sources and see if that will give her a satisfactory news feed without all the junk. I used to use Google News, but it has become nothing but spammy tabloid links with no relevance to me. I mostly got my news through Reddit in recent years, but Lemmy reintroduced me to RSS and I’ve been working on collecting good news sources like back in the good old days before the social media firehose of info.

Unfortunately (for the purpose of offering advice), I have no experience with remote tech support. My dad is a retired computer engineer so he’s got a handle on things at his place. I live with the tech-challenged person in my family.

Wow, the half off student price ten years ago was $50/year in the US. You get it incredibly cheap!

Now you are supposed to sacrifice your sleep for Amazon? No thanks!

I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.

I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That’s way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It’s no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.

There’s already an entire Star Trek instance, startrek.website. Niche instances may end up being a way some communities get around the issue of big servers defederating from each other over their different administration policies. With that topic having its own instance, Trek fans on Beehaw and Lemmy.world can unite in nerdy fandom across the divide. I’m not quite sure how the defederation works through a third party instance though, if posts/comments from Lemmy.world users to startrek.website will still show up when viewed through beehaw’s display of the communities there or if they will be filtered out of the feed locally.