We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

Not sure but I bet it has a co.uk tld

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 as set up.

Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.

Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?

I would imagine there are whole teams of Sociologists tracking his and JKR’s tweets at the moment to plot the Brownian motion movement from rich idiot to full fascist.

Should’ve opted for the Stewart timeline.

A few little things rather than one or two big things - email advertised as private but they won’t let you use anonymous addresses (like anonaddy or duck.com) for recovery addresses, an ever growing portfolio of products that seem unfinished or incomplete or lacking in standard features like they’re trying to corner the whole privacy market rather than making one or two products but making them really good, poor customer service and support as a continual theme throughout their existence.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting they’re doing anything dodgy, I just feel that I don’t really trust them. They just make really odd choices and it all feels like a haphazard rush.

You would think that someone at Proton would’ve had the foresight to realise the reputational damage this (along with the LLM announcement) would do to the company.

Without wanting to sound smart after the fact, I’ve been suspicious about Proton for years. I briefly had an email account with them but I could never quite shake the feeling there is something off about the whole company. This move just confirms to me I was correct to be suspicious.

The video has its sources listed in a Google Doc in the description, but if reading rather than video is more your thing (or you’re not keen on using Google stuff - and I get that) there’s also TempleWatcher’s pages on Greaves and Jarry, the two co-owners of TST.

If an instance has alt front ends they’re usually listed in the sidebar of that instances home page :)

The only other one available on your instance is: https://oldsh.itjust.works/ but you could login to your instance using the alexandrite installation on the project page

I wish there was a way but there’s so much bad stuff and it all kind of interweaves with every other aspect of itself. I could tell you Greaves was a eugenicist who’s made eugenicist, racist, antisemitic, ablist statements in the past but without going through everything else in the video its next to impossible to explain how that impacts on how he operates today.

Neither of them are good people but I don’t want anyone to just take my word for it - the receipts are at that link.

Fair warning: some of it is very disturbing. There’s a lot of quoted racism, antisemitism etc. It’s not an easy watch. If you make it through the whole thing, there’s also some very interesting comments left by current and ex members too.

Milton was a staunch Christian. It was interpretations of Paradise Lost a hundred years or so after it was written by the likes of William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron and Shelley that were the formation of Romantic Satanism, which in turn inspired the modern atheistic, compassionate Satanism of today.

There are alternatives to TST that are not problematic in the way TST’s leaders are.

Being old does the trick for me.