Lemmy is very much a viable alternative
Oh, how I wish that were true. Alas, stats keep showing that Lemmy is not continuing to grow, on the contrary. There is close to zero activity in anything but the most main stream communities and Lemmy is only now making very, very slow and tentative steps to actually surface more niche communities after effectively burying and suffocating them in every release up to and including the current stable.
Yeah, until the printer engineers took over from the sewing machine engineers in around 2020. Even Brother is evil now, rolling out firmware updates that render third party toner useless or do even more evil shenanigans via firmware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I don’t think there’s a good brand left these days, Brother was the last bastion of “not shitty” and now they, too, were enshittified.
Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.
Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit?
You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates outright blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Now, that even Brother has turned to the dark side, I really don’t know what printer to recommend other than older/used Brothers with firmware updates disabled.
Do not update its firmware and disable auto-updates:
Brother used to be the best choice, until ~2020 when they, too, went over to the dark side and secretly blocked third party toners via firmware auto-updates.
Not sure if any non-shitty printer makers are left, there’s only so long that you can recommend “try to find an old Brother printer and disable firmware updates” is an effective choice.
Yes, the hardware (a cheap sponge, essentially) that the counter “protects” is easily replaced for little money - but you still can’t just reset the counter.
https://epson.com/support/epson-ink-pads-reset-utility-faqs
For “North American users” Epson now offers a tool to reset the self destruct counter one, single, time.
There are third parties now, that offer a reset of the software destruct counter, for a fee.
The fact that a printer sold as “Eco” has a software self destruct that the user requires an unlock key to reset - an occurrence frequent enough to make it a profitable business for third parties to sell such keys - should tell you all you need to know about these printers.
I couldn’t confirm, but there supposedly are more premium models with user serviceable waste ink tanks that don’t have a self destruct, but most consumer models very much have this limitation.
They are both terrible. HP for obvious reasons, Epson for its self destruct timers.
Until the software counter decides that the waste ink pad is full and the thing blows a software fuse.
Epson’s official solution to a full pad is to throw out your printer and buy a new one - literally a printer with a self destruct timer. Not very “eco”.
The Epson printers with the non-serviceable waste ink pads and the software self destruct timer? Not sure how user friendly or “eco” those are.
Great idea, atrocious execution.
Inkjet is pretty much terrible for anyone printing very little (more ink wasted on cleaning cycles than actually printing, high chance that the ink dries up regardless) and very much (stupidly expensive and unreliable).
If you don’t need color, get a cheap b/w laser printer. Brother used to be one of the last good ones until they, too, decided to block third party cartridges via firmware updates last year.
If you can get an old, used, Brother laser printer for cheap, go for it - they were borderline indestructible and would print with any cheap toner.
That’s not what I use Reddit for and that’s sadly the only Reddit (and other social media) thing today, that Lemmy mimics successfully.
I’m using Reddit mostly for the niche and special interest communities. For specific tech advice and troubleshooting. For all the stuff that once used to be home on newsgroups and bulletin boards and can now only be found in subreddits and, even worse, Discord communities.
And a lot of these smaller tech communities were super motivated to move to Lemmy, but Lemmy’s complete inability to surface anything but the most popular posts in the most popular communities (there’s still no equivalent for multireddits and there was no weighted popularity until 0.19) rapidly killed and suffocated virtually all of them.
That’s the reason why you can type “obscure technical problem Reddit” into Google and almost always get a relevant answer, while that will likely never be the case for Lemmy.
I’m not saying Lemmy doesn’t have good communities, it certainly does, but once you go beyond news, politics and memes there’s neither enough content nor enough users to keep anything else alive.