I can’t speak to Arch but I use Ubuntu every day. I hate on Ubuntu because I use it every day. They make terrible choices. They’ve got common, serious issues people have reported at least as far back as 2009 with no acknowledgement or plan to address. I’m on LTS and they push through multiple reboot requiring sets of updates a week, heedless of the impacts.

I don’t feel like learning a totally new environment so I’ll be switching my main computer to Mint whenever I get the time. So I can deal with someone else’s annoying decisions for a while.

I can’t say whether it can be cleanly migrated to another app but there are a number of export options to get you either to plain Markdown or something else within reason. When using the export option, the resulting Markdown at lest gives relative paths to any included media.

I don’t think it’s fair to suggest it’s not using Markdown. It just has a wrapper around it to make it work better for the usual use case of being a digital workbook.

Being limited isn’t that big a deal. My instance has them limited because of their lax moderation and an excess of reply guys. All it means is that I get a notification saying “Someone you might know sent you a notification” and I get to review and accept or deny the notification depending. Plus they have to request permission to follow me so I get to check them out before accepting.

I still have tons of mutuals on .social and I get new ones all the time. While each person making the choice about whether to accept notifications or follows from a particular user is going to make their own choices, I don’t think it’s particularly inconvenient.

The closest thing to groups we have on mastodon really are just boost bots. It’s pretty annoying that mastodon doesn’t have more. But it’s pretty understandable that mastodon users would assume that.

I’m guessing the issue is with mastodon users at-ing multiple communities on Lemmy/etc creating unnecessary cross posts / duplicates?

I’m not sure what version they’re running on their flagship but I last posted from there on March 20th and my blog federated to Mastodon.

More for the OP but if you’re looking for a blog with a comment section, I wouldn’t recommend WriteFreely at present. Customization is also unnecessarily painful.

It does federate. Social features are rudimentary. I end up using my existing microblogs to promote the posts anyway.

I knew all that going in and chose it anyway. It’s not for everyone but it does what I need it to at a price I’m fine with.

Mostly I agree but I disagree in this way:

Face to face, especially in a small community, some people take it upon themselves to establish what they see as the right and proper rules for the community. Everyone must have a grassy lawn cut to exactly three inches is kind of the least terrible end of this.

“Queer people are a danger to our children”, “Everyone must be in a straight, monogamous relationship, that produces children who aren’t autistic or disabled in any way,” etc. and, because it’s in person, they have much more power to ruin lives.

We see some of that behavior in online communities but people generally have much more ability to “vote with their feet” or even abstain online.

I had Instagram for five minutes before they started trying to share my account with acquaintances who didn’t know I was queer. (Which is a crime as far as I’m concerned but not relevant.) I immediately closed my account. Imagine that had been a neighborhood I’d just moved into. It might not even be possible for me to move before I faced months of the real life consequences of being forcibly outed by a neighbor.

There’s a veneer of politeness in meat space. Sometimes there’s more than a veneer to it. But often not.