Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin unavailable for comment.

Possibly too esoteric a reference but if you know, you know etc.

Yeah, we broke away from TST in around 2018. Too centralised, too controlling, with concerning owners. We also have a couple of US Orders these days (Steel City in Pittsburgh and House of Heretics in Seattle).

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’.

Not sure that its a must have and possibly uBO could handle it if I could be bothered to check but I like LocalCDN too.

Minecraft Delorean.

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.

His lies/alternate reality are not so much believed as embraced - the people who support him already loathe and hate the things he’s talking about. All he’s doing is lending them legitimacy. Most people are, by and large, reactionary and seek out things and people that confirm their own beliefs. Nothing here is new apart from the scale of it and the new technical ability to increase that scale.

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.