JustOneMoreCat

I admin a Facebook group with just about 30k people in it. It used to be great, and over the past few years the enshittification has been too much. Lately there is an out of control Facebook AI bot posting constantly pissing everyone off that we can't seem to turn off. I only use FB for the group, and don't have their spyware - I mean, app - installed and wont. Admin abilities are severely limited on the webapp.

I'm stepping down as admin cuz I'm tired of this mess. But I'd like to offer an alternative community to members who are ready to jump ship. Is a Lemmy community the best option? It's a photo heavy group so when Pixelfed launches groups that will be great, but I haven't seen an ETA on that. I've read that Piefed has better mod controls. It can/should be public and accessible across platforms.

Thoughts? And before anyone points it out, I know most folks won't bother switching. But I also miss when it was smaller and had more chill vibes so I can live with that.

I have a Windows 11 laptop and recently gotten excited to try Linux. I read good things about Mint being pretty good to go out of the box, and while I can be a fast learner I'm also tired and don't have a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

So I followed all the installation instructions, verified, flashed a USB, booted into it and started to install a dual boot of it. Made it through installation until it told me my computer had BitLocker on, and I'd need to go turn it off and try again. Fair enough.

Went back into my Windows OS (after booting it went to "diagnosing your PC"). I don't seem to have bitlocker installed - looks like a Pro version thing which I don't have. It did show that encryption was enabled, so I turned it off.

Restarted to boot to USB. Nope, "mmx64.efi - Not Found" error.

OK, googled it, renamed it, let's go.

error: shim_lock protocol not found error: you need to load kernel first

OK... I googled it just enough to see this is going to be a pain.

I tried remaking my USB just in case, didn't help. It's extra frustrating because my first attempt to boot into Linux went so well! How did it go from booting into it flawlessly to giving me a series of errors?

Did I anger the Microsoft gods and now they're blocking my path? Is this a bad omen that Linux is going to be a problem on my laptop in general?

New to this, but just set up Stremio on my desktop with a paid Real Debris subscription, and added the Torrentio (along with some other addons).

Worked amazing this morning - watched a new episode of our kids favorite show that we didn't have access to before (~20 min long) flawlessly. BUT when we tried to load the next episode we lost our internet connection. I thought it was a fluke, but our ISP is pretty reliable and it just happened again. Tried to load a show, it was slow and laggy, then we lost our WiFi.

SO, obviously there's a problem. We aren't on a VPN yet because I read that we didn't need one when using RD, but something is clearly wrong and I don't want to piss our ISP off and lose our service.

I'm not using it of course until we figure it out. I've considered getting Proton VPN and trying with that, but I feel like after two times losing our connection I probably better not make any mistakes. 🫤

Advice please?

UPDATE: Resolved, I think. 🤞 Our WiFi came back after a while, and I made a few changes. I deleted the newer version of Stremio and replaced it with the older stable version, changed DNS to quad9, double checked my Torrentio configuration, and ran it using Proton VPN. It was slow and laggy, but I think that is more to do with WiFi speeds here than anything else. Tried without VPN and it still worked but didn't improve speed.

Slowly but surely trying to de google my life, but Google Photos is a hard one. I have a kid and seven pets, and I've come to rely on Google Photo's search abilities to actually find anything I want to see in the hot mess of disorganized photos.

I tried a trial of Ente and filled it up to the free limit with pics. It was able to recognize my toddler in THREE photos, no one else. I don't know how many or which photos are backed up because it doesn't seem to show them separate from my un-backed up ones. It doesn't learn to recognize pets as far as I can tell.

I'm too tired to learn to self host just to use Immich, even though I've heard good things, ha.