One thing of note, since Pixelfed is part of the Fediverse, posts made on Pixelfed instances can be seen by users of Mastodon and other platforms that use the same protocol! It’s really neat!

There’s actually quite a few bits that are compatible! I tried out the OnePlus 6 with Phosh, and there are lots of good apps already! Make sure to look for apps that are labeled “adaptive” in the software store, those work the best on mobile. Firefox also works quite well with the “Add Water” app, it gives it a GTK theme (matches with Phosh) and increases padding by a bit.

As for the apps I liked (all of which adapted well in mobile): Geary (email client, GTK3 I think, so you need to enable dark mode in the mobile settings), Fractal (Matrix client), Gapless (music player), GNOME/KDE Weather, Secrets (KeePass client), Apostrophe (Markdown notes), Mimick (Immich sync client), Fotema (photo gallery), Animatch (match game with cute art and no microtransactions or ads, open-source too!), Ultimate Tic Tac Toe (actually has quite a bit of strategy involved), Pentobi (very similar to the “Blokus” board game if you’ve ever played that, very fun!)

And there are a lot of KDE/Qt equivalents that I have not tried (since I was running the GTK-based Phosh)

Being able to install Flathub apps was very handy actually, and it’s one of the reasons why I decided to try postmarketOS over something like Ubuntu Touch.

If you want to explore other mobile apps (on Flathub): https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/mobile/1

When you mentioned your self-hosted services and that self-hosted suggestions are welcome, I assumed you had some of that infrastructure setup already

I mentioned this as self-hosted services were going to be recommended anyways (because they’re awesome!), but for something that is public, it’s something I will do later rather than now.

Since you already run Immich; why not use it’s share links?

Because then I would need to set up a domain name, reverse proxy, and that sort. I don’t have the time to troubleshoot networking stuff, so locally hosted it is for now. When I do get the time, I will set that up!

their results seem mostly identical to ddg/bing too though it’s occasionally better than them for some reason

I believe Ecosia uses either Google or Bing search indexes depending on the region, but they are working on an independent index with Qwant that will hopefully be a good alternative! If you live in France, it’s already bring trialled!

But yeah, Ecosia is like any search engine and there is bit of greenwashing with LLMs and all. However, they are a non-profit with transparent earnings reports, and that makes them better than Google, Bing, DDG, etc. for me.

they geoblock certain countries including mine since 2023 or so

Dang, that sucks.

That’s fair enough (unfortunately, this is the case for most search engines aside from SearXNG instances I think)! Thankfully they do let you disable it, which is nice. I mostly like that they are quite transparent about how they operate! The planting trees thing is a nice bonus, but they certainly aren’t saints to the environment, no search engine is

I think that makes sense, water is absorbed into the bloodstream, right? And then the kidneys filter the blood and the bad bits + excess water is peed out. Which is why your pee looks saturated yellow if you are dehydrated and almost clear (but don’t drink it!) when you have drank a lot of water.

Any remaining water in your digestive tract that isn’t absorbed would be in your poos! If you have diarrhoea and your poos are all liquidy, that means water is not being absorbed properly (bad!)

I didn’t do Biology, I’m a Physics+Chem student, so this could be completely wrong!

As for birds being dinosaurs, you also have a lot of physical similarities too! The feet of non-avian dinosaurs are similar to those of modern birds with hollow bones, and I think the skulls were similar in shape too. Recently, we have also found evidence of some dinosaurs being feathered. There is also evidence of bird-like behaviours in some dinosaurs, like brooding (e.g. a hen sitting on some eggs) and herding (grouping together)

Too bad, now you, me, and everyone is a fish. All the tetrapods were originally descended from fish (technically, the ancestor to the modern kind of fish), meaning we are closer to bony fish than sharks are!

Mammals (including us humans!), reptiles, dinosaurs (and by extension birds), and amphibians are all FISH!

our robot overlords will pamper us as much as I pamper my chickens

Unfortunately for us humans, the majority of chickens live in horrible conditions in large corporate farms. Should the robots ever start to take over, I hope by that time we will be treating other species better, else they learn from us!

searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…

Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition

As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it’s not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn’t great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don’t particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.

Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.

Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!

I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.

I’m not from the U.S. so I have no idea how flippy guys are doing over there, but in Asian markets they are quite popular and probably won’t die out anytime soon.

But yes, Samsung being a market leader, although it doesn’t mean it’s completely dead, it does show bad signs. Like how headphone jacks were removed, as although they remain in some budget devices as well as in Sony’s Xperia line, the feature becomes niche and less mainstream.

Hence why I specified OSM being better in densely populated regions! It is a good point that, depending where you live, OSM could be a pretty inaccurate mapping tool. If you want, you could help contribute to OSM for your region! (There’s a few apps available that gameifies it if you’re into that)

In Hong Kong, where I grew up in, everything is well mapped and all the MTR stations are labeled. And during my short trip to Germany, I was able to find a relatively obscure restaurant in Munich.

I do think a lot of it is from people with older devices only upgrading now, rather than jumping from S25 to S26.

I would imagine that a lot of people are only now upgrading from some of the older S series devices, and there have been enough improved from e.g. S22 to S26 to warrant an upgrade.

I would also guess that some people, particularly those who are less tech-literate, like Samsung’s new AI features (it was like the majority of their recent keynotes, there are very few hardware changes!) that they restrict to the newest devices. I would guess this isn’t to most people’s tastes on Lemmy, but a regular person just sees cool image editing tools and summarisation features.

But yeah, purely hardware wise, the new Samsung devices have barely changed aside from the chip bump, and the “privacy screen” of the Ultra, as it turns out, doesn’t really work that well (something noted in a Mrwhosetheboss video, where the phone number of one of their friends/staff was accidentally leaked, and they usually shill Samsung’s AI features to a high degree), and it also cuts down the resolution when enabled which isn’t great. Viewing angles when it’s disabled are also worse than last year

Oooo indeed!

I believe Xiaomi has already stopped making new Mix Fold devices (the big screen ones) while their Mix Flip series is still quite popular, at least enough to not get killed as a product line.

For Motorola, their big screen fold devices were not very well received, as they were not competitive hardware-wise, while their small screen devices are considered one of the best in the category

how many people really need a phone that can turn into a tablet?

Turns out, quite a few, especially if you do a lot of business and whatnot. A relative of mine has a folding phone and they appreciate having a much larger screen for reading PDFs, spreadsheets, etc. on the go. It also means they don’t need to bring a large tablet everywhere, so they can get a 13" tablet (instead of a smaller size) just for home use and not need to worry about bringing it around on trips and such

Also of note, this is just Samsung jumping out of the game, but other companies like Motorola, Xiaomi, or similar could take the market of flip phones. For Samsung, their big fold phones are more profitable, but in contrast, those are less profitable for Motorola and Xiaomi (whose small fold phones have been much more popular compares to their bigger options)

I think both big screen and little guy folding phones have their place.

My sibling has a folding phone with an open toilet as their wallpaper, and they said that’s probably the only reason why they wanted a flippy phone. They also say the pocketability is nice, and they don’t really care about the worse camera bits for the price (they definitely aren’t using it in camcorder mode)

Open Street Map absolutely suck

You have upset a lot of people. OSM is an awesome alternative to Google Maps, it’s basically the Wikipedia equivalent for mapping where everyone can help contribute by adding locations and such. Particularly for densely populated areas, I find it to be very accurate, and there’s even support for public transit!

I wouldn’t consider using a slap-stick repo like F-Droid

You have somehow upset even more people. F-Droid has soooo many good open-source apps that are stable and they usually work far better (and look nicer for the most part) compared to proprietary options. CoMaps is a good client for OSM and arguably has a nicer interface than GMaps, and you can install maps offline which is super convenient! Kvaesitso is a nice search-based custom launcher that is much better than the stock one for my purposes, and Lawnchair is another good option if you want something closer to vanilla Android. More great FOSS apps:

• Breezy Weather
• Etar (calendar)
• Auxio (local music player)
• Aegis (2FA codes)
• Chrono (clock)
• FluffyChat (Matrix client)
• HeliBoard (keyboard, the BEST ONE! even has accurate suggestions and glide typing!)
• various self-hosted bits (Nextcloud, Immich, etc.)
• KDE Connect and LocalSend (AirDrop+ that is cross-platform, the former is preinstalled on KDE Plasma)

And games on F-Droid are a bit more lacking, but here are some nice ones I found:

• Simon Tatham’s Puzzles (all the puzzles you could want, quite fun!)
• Breakout 71 (fun game that is quite neat)
• Retroarch (emulation, my device can play up to PS2/GC and Wii, but higher end models can even do Switch!)

Plus, you don’t have to use the F-Droid repos. You can use third-party repositories like IzzyOnDroid or similar with the F-Droid client!