How would you manage stalking, harassment, impersonation, assault and various other kinds of violence? This is not a place for laissez-faire management.
You need to consider the social side prior to the technical side.
If you are in the US, how are you going to manage compliance with FOSTA SESTA? or your local equivalent?
If you could figure that out, pick some sort of small market in which to establish it, such as a certain subculture in a limited geographic area. That's how things used to get released and it is much more amenable to success. Do you remember when facebook or craigslist "opened" in your location? It's better to have 100 people on a dating site that are in physical proximity than 1000 people who are remote from each other. Even better if those 100 people share some sort of affinity. If you are thinking of a hetro(/bi/pan) site you are going to need something that lots of women are interested in, so federated social networks can't be it.
Go with XFCE, it is perfect to start from. You will get a feeling for linux in a fairly intuitive environment. Then you can easily move on to other stuff if you want to. You can install multiple DEs/WMs and choose which one you want from the log in screen. You can install as many as you have disk space for.
One thing to know about the concept of "customization" in linux. It is on a whole other level than you may be thinking of. On linux when people say something is customizable, especially when you start reading phrases like "infinitely customizable" what it might means is that you must configure it to even open it. And to do that you will first have to spend a bunch of time learning about the application's conventions, history, weirdsies, development environment, etc. You may also have to understand and be able to manipulate the underlying system architecture.
It's fun to do once you reach the basic required skills, if you are interested in that kind of thing. but you can only learn so many things at a time, so set yourself up for success by starting easy. You can move on to a more complex situation at any time you are ready for it. Like imagine learning to drive in a place you've never been with totally different traffic laws than you are used to, and also it's on the moon so gravity don't work as expected. Better learn to drive in an empty parking lot close to where you live.
First thing is make sure linux will run at all on your computer. You can install it, boot it, shut it down, connect to the internet, play audio, make a backup, un/install applications, and other simple tasks. Just go path of least resistance. Don't try to find the perfect set up. Just try something out.
SSD ASAP
Make a separate /home/ partition when you install --- this will keep your actual files (documents, user configurations) safe(r) from screw-ups
Find a way to make regular backups of your user and system configuration files, keeping past versions in case you screw something up but don't realize it right away
and doesn't mention that they are a C programmer or anything. It is extremely unlikely that OP
can customize the entire things by modifying the source code
because it is extremely unlikely they would have any idea as to how to do such a thing. How many people, on earth, in total, can set up, run, and edit the source file of a tiling window manager? Now remove from that value those who are existing linux users. Functionally 0%.
This person wants to start using linux, is asking very simple questions. They are asking here which suggests they do not have a deep and rich existing network of people in their life to provide 1-on-1 support. Otherwise they'd ask one of their many sysadmin friends for individualized advice. You are suggesting to them something which takes a pretty wide diversity of skills and knowledge. And since the specific thing you are suggesting is a window manager, when they can't figure out how to use it, they will be unable to use their computer.
I wouldn't advise a beginner start with vim on day 1, but at least if they did they'd still be able to use the computer for things other than text editing. And find a different text editor while they learned vim.
This is stunningly bad advice, verging on sabotage. Why do you want people to hate linux?
I don't know if anyone here has anything as constructive as what they should have done, having reached this point in history. If I was suddenly dropped into spez's body, I do not have a clue what I would do other than completely back track the past 2 months and eat a literal hat with a fork and knife. Don't know if even that would work.
Well there are 49 subscribed people on patreon totaling $170/month. Lots of people probably already have accounts set up which makes it a very low threshold to join.
Meanwhile on librepay, arguably more philosophically suitable, there are 11 subscribers totaling $13/month.
Man, considering how many people I have seen saying how great it is to be able to pay, and asserting they are making donations, those are very low numbers.
I would really like the option to choose between multiple instances (even accounts on same instance??), which I think is the very last line of your post. :)
On reddit I was very grateful to the RES account switcher, and mobile app that let you easily switch accounts. I would probably never have actually gotten into reddit without those. It let me use completely different parts of reddit to express and explore different interests I think one of the things that made reddit the best social media platform was how pseudonymous it was. Total opposite of facebook "real name policy" attitude.
In the lemmy/kbin situation I am not sure how the interface would be. Need 1) some kind of persistent switching interface, 2) reminders of what account you are in. In RES it showed you your account name at the top of the page in the selector, and optionally above every comment box so you didn't accidentally post as the wrong account.
In the meantime I guess I will eventually install every available extension that does this and assign each one an account lol. Or pick one and make several local forks and install separately. hmm
omg you do not need to explain. :) I'm sure that comment was intended as appreciation for your good work. just joking about how hard it was bad in the old days and kids these days have it so easy.
If I deleted my account I would never again get that special feeling of conducting a websearch to solve some problem and finding a hit from a person who looks like they are having exactly the same issue as me, only to find it was me posting 2 years ago and there are no useful responses.
Makes me wonder how identifiable I am by my "accent" online... I must phrase things in unusual ways. And I spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that are either unsolvable or over my head..
I always find this situation crushing, demoralizing and very funny and until lemmy has better search indexing I don't want to give it up.
Also I wrote things I think were useful too. But I don't stumble no them.
