when it comes to playing music, i use Amberol. it just queues up songs and plays them, it's minimal but gets the job done. as for browsing my music collection, i just use my file manager (in my case, Nautilus). editing my tags is a bit trickier. Ear Tag does almost everything i need, but i still have to keep Ex Falso around for track number generation (i'm certain there's a way to do it in Ear Tag, but i haven't found it)
on my laptop, i access the Lemmy web frontend through Tangram. on mobile, i currently just access it through Firefox, but i'd like to switch to an app once i find one i like
Firefish née Calckey is a microblogging platform like Mastodon, but that's about all it has in common. Firefish has extra features like emoji reactions (like Facebook's, but you can use any emoji, including custom emoji), quote posts, and better support for deep threads (it displays replies in a tree view like Lemmy or Kbin, unlike Mastodon which tries to linearize them and makes them a confusing mess). it also supports text formatting like bold, italics, headings, custom link text, and even animations (don't worry, they don't autoplay). it's even themable, and supports migrating posts from other accounts so you don't have to start over!
a new instance doesn't know about any other instances at first. when someone on the new instance, instance A, searches up a community on instance B, instance A now knows about the existence of instance B and starts pulling content. the more communities people on instance A subscribe to, the more of the Fediverse instance A sees.
what this means in practice is that a community can be hosted on any instance, and people from any other instance (that isn't blocked by the community's instance) can post and comment on it seamlessly. the community you posted this to is hosted on lemmy.world, but you have an account on kbin.social. and i have an account on sopuli.xyz!
this means that you get the freedom to pick whichever instance you want to set up your account. since each instance is its own independent website, if one instance goes down, the rest of the network isn't affected. you could even set up your own instance on your own hardware! different instances have different rules and vibes, and if one instance is misbehaving (e.g. mods have lost control, the software is glitching and spamming other instances with too much traffic, there are nazis), other instances can block it temporarily or permanently.
as for how many instances there are, FediDB lists 1,175. no instance sees every other instance, so there isn't an optimal one to join like some people have asked about
they wouldn't be able to do anything. youtube-dl doesn't use an API or anything like that, it just streams the video like a browser would and rips the stream. if they somehow actually managed to selectively block youtube-dl, all youtube-dl would have to do is send a different user agent. the only defense against stream ripping in general is to not stream anything at all, which Youtube obviously cannot do
at the top, you'll see three views: Subscribed, Local, and All. Subscribed is your curated view of communities that you subscribed to, Local is a view of all the posts on your instance, and All is a view of all the posts across the entire network
i'm sure you all have heard of Outer Wilds (which i highly recommend and is 40% off right now) but a lesser-known game is Rain World. it's an absolutely brutal survival platformer where you play as a little slugcat trying to find their way home in a dying world. it's not for everyone, but if you like exploration, ancient mysteries, action, a bleak atmosphere, and you don't mind dying a hundred times, absolutely give it a go
i'd honestly love to visit St. Petersburg if that happens
it's a known bug in Lemmy. sometimes comments get sent to the wrong thread
according to The Telegraph, Russia may end up disintegrating entirely over this https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/24/russia-verge-collapse-elites-try-escape-wagner-coup/
it was literally just the five of them
believe it or not, that wasn't the original purpose of copyright. copyright was invented as a form of censorship. in 1556, the Charter of the Stationers' Company was given the exclusive right to control the operation of printing presses in England, up to and including the ability to seize offending books and burn the printing presses that made them (L. Ray Patterson, Copyright and "the Exclusive Right" of Authors, p. 9)