And it’ll stay that way until people use, and keep using, this space. So, to use an overused phrase, be the change you want to see :)

Hence why the Satanic org I’m part of are currently running our Satan Not Hatin’ campaign :)

Farewell to the flesh :(

They are not TST-affiliated, more like an old style LaVeyan group.

The Satanic org I’m a member of also have a Chilean Order and I know the two orgs have talked but their LaVeyan-ism (i.e. libertarian/Ayn Rand type of Objectivism) doesn’t really align with us.

I unplugged the bassist but noone noticed cared.

+1 for The Terror. That and Carrion Comfort are my two favourite Dan Simmons novels.

Notice how its the only copy? All the others on that table have small stacks. It’s like someone got it off the shelves deeper into the shop and then their nerve failed them.

There was some talk awhile ago of the devs maybe extending feeds beyond Communities to Posts and Comments too but I don’t think it ever got off the ground. Would certainly be way easier to do what I think you want if they did exist.

Growth is a secondary concern to me. I’m not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.

Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.

I’m enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don’t have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can’t opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.

Come on its obvious! Sedan - see Dan. Staring at a man called Dan.

Also ‘red’ has 3 letters, just like ‘gay’.

I agree, mostly, young people start with tiktok (or whatever the platform du jour is) and the algo pushes Andrew Tate at them. Xitter is now a cesspit of hate. There are FB Groups and Insta accounts monetising ‘news’ and YT accounts pushing hate as ‘news’.

Simplistic populism is easy to digest and easy to understand. No matter how ludicrous it is, the idea that the root of your problems is muslims/the dems/women/trans folks/the gays/whatever is simple, easy to understand and easy to communicate. Its made for algorithm driven content.

I don’t want to be that old cunt at the back of the room harping on about the good old days but we live in an age when truth is irrelevant and easy to understand but utterly wrong information gets spread far and wide. Facts are usually complex, nuanced and not easy to present in a soundbite type way and nobody listens to explanations that last more than 5mins.

People of my generation invented this info hellscape and are profiting from it. The young are the ones paying the price.

Is he quite a big cat, sort of a burnt orange colour, white underbelly with a very, very bushy tail?

I’m approaching my sixties now. I’ve been through a lot of the messes of recent history. The world today (and it is the world, its not just the US although that is the most flagrant example) feels genuinely different. Just the sheer amount of misinformed hate and self-destructive uber capitalism feels like its reaching a crescendo. What comes after that is worrying to think about.

Only Brits or BBC International viewers will know this character but Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.

And obviously Ellen Ripley, Dana Scully and Sarah Connor.

I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

A fascist party coming to power.

Led by a man who wants to call himself Chancellor.

In Austria.

But inciting violence politically is, judging by recent events, absolutely fine.

Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.

I’ve had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy is set up.

Wouldn’t it be better to just stop doing the thing that’s making the existing reefs die?