https://vegastack.com/tutorials/how-to-install-lxde-on-ubuntu-22-04/ This is the guide I was using, if it helps. I’d take a look at section 1, step 2, where it shows the picture of the “Configure LightDM” menu. I think it’s probably not too bad, but I’d be curious to hear how it goes.

I haven’t used Ubuntu in a bit, but I’m decently familiar with linux overall. Looked up a guide. It indicated you could install LXDE with sudo apt install lxde and then reboot. The guide said that LXDE should be the default Desktop Environment now, because it’s the most recently installed one. If for whatever reason LXDE isn’t the new default, on the Login screen, in the upper left corner there should be a dialogue box to select whichever Desktop Environment you want as the new default.

I understand those concerns, but I’m not sure if this really improved the security of mastodon, an inherently very insecure software, and it definitely deprived us of a useful tool. Defederation works at stopping spam, but I don’t think it really helps much when it comes to preventing people from seeing things you post. It stops a single server, but bad actors can just migrate to a new one, or spin up a new hostname.

I hated the backlash the bridgy dev received. His project was genuinely useful, helped to solve one of people’s most common criticisms of the fediverse. And after he was browbeat into giving it up, everything still got hoovered up by bots and fed into AI models anyway.