Yeah, the irony is not lost on me!

Early on in the life of software I think a faster pace of development makes sense, when the software is less complex and there are fewer affected users. I think most Piefed users accept that they are very much using software that is still in active development.

Mastodon, on the other hand, is used by people who consider it to already be mature. A large number of people and organizations depend on it. Personally I trust it with the only actively maintained social media account I have in my real name. Moving too fast and making mistakes could have pretty fatal consequences there.

There are features I would like to see implemented as well - I think proper quote posts will be nothing but a huge improvement - but I appreciate that the developers are taking their sweet time making sure to get it right. And if Piefed reaches a million active users I expect its developer(s) to do the same.

I’ve been using Linux half my life, I have my own Email server, I avoid centralized social media and I hate Outlook with a passion.

I have two active accounts there.

If I recall correctly it just doesn’t scale well, and starts performing poorly as the user count goes up.

Personally I prefer Mastodon. In the end there’s only three dimensions: Security, performance, and personal preference.

I’m happy with how Mastodon is being run. Move fast and break things kan kiss my ass. Move slowly and don’t suck.

It takes time to build friendships. If you meet people for an activity that’s a start, but if you don’t feel like any of them are friend material (or they’re too busy) you need to branch out. Try finding a larger/different group that does that activity, or better yet, try out something else.

Volunteering tends to be a great starting point.

Friendships often start with a leap of faith of sorts - you hang out in a given context, and at some point somebody takes the next step (wanna grab a beer/grab lunch/come for dinner/go to the game/whatever)

You kind of do things that are a bit ahead of your current level of friendship, and then if it works out you’ve managed to upgrade.

Much more informative than my post - thank you for the write-up, sorry for jumping the line!

He ended up purged himself, and is now running as an independent.

Good times.

I find it hard to believe anyone can have such an incredibly clairvoyant understanding of the tech industry that they manage to see Mozilla as an evil megacorporation, yet at the same time failing to see any fundamental problem with Brave.

It could be a lot of things going on other than just sexism, but I cannot help but feel like any time a woman takes the lead in an open source organization a bunch of often vague but always hateful discourse follows in open source forums. Most people are of course fine, but a toxic minority will usually manage to get some weird discourse going that spreads to anyone taking whatever they spew on face value.

Often it can be hard to distinguish valid criticism from less than valid criticism, and in the case of big organizations there is always valid critiques to be made, so I don’t blame people all that much for falling for it. Still, being a happy user of both GNOME and Mozilla products for more than a decade, it tickles me just how much hatred these projects receive online.

That’s my five cents anyway.

It’s a bit of a dog whistle, I just don’t entirely understand for what yet. Basically you’re better off not asking and going on with your life.

A charitable answer is, however, that a central source of income for Mozilla is Google paying them to remain their default search engine. Mozilla is hesitant to truly attack Google, as it would be biting the hand that feeds it.

More importantly though, Mozilla has a female chairwoman. A lot of tech savvy people would rather stick with Brave, whose CEO they can relate to.

We all know Trump is Putin’s man in America. We all witnessed his presidency, we all saw their cozy little press conference with their secret little meeting.

It boggles my mind how dishonest or plain stupid one has to be, as a serious journalist, to frame MAGA Putin supporters as something intellectually surprising or out of the ordinary. Trumpism has been Putin’s project since day one, and there’s no way the journalist is not aware of that.

Journalists are so fucking hungry for a spin they obscure reality in the process.

I hate that I’m surprised by the clarity of this answer. Hopefully Netanyahu is too.

I’d consider Bolzano. You’d get by with German, and you get to live in a beautiful part of the arguably most beautiful country of Europe.

In Germany? You’ll be fine, they’re very aware of the threat of antisemitism but it’s not any worse than elsewhere.

Now, whether German culture is enjoyable is another question.

Israeli politics have been fucked for a long time. Netanyahu has always been a dangerous extremist, and the fact that people repeatedly voted for him speaks volumes for the political culture.

If by Eastern Europe you mean Belarus and Hungary, maybe.

I think, like so many other realities of American politics, it needs to be understood as a sad reflection of America itself.

RFK Jr. caters to a specific branch of the mentally ill, but in a country with severe social problems and unavailable mental health care services this is not such a tiny niche. COVID sent a lot of people over the edge, and an anti-vaccine candidate in it’s wake is bound to do well.

Combine this with the fact that conspiratorially minded Americans are obsessed with the Kennedys, and you have yourself a candidate who appeals strongly to a non-negligible part of the population.

You’ll never be anything less than what you are, but that’s a strength. Just speaking two languages well already puts you at an advantage. The experiences you have of seeing the cultures in relation to each other also gives you an edge.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to just blend in, but life is all about learning and gathering experiences and impressions, and you have a head start. It might not always be easy, but you’ll learn to appreciate it.

And as long as Poland is in the EU I’d much rather have a Polish passport than an English one.

Progressive tax is normal in most functional countries, it’s not rocket science.

Basically you define X as a base sum that needs to be controlled for inflation. Minimum wage can be 2X, whereas 100% taxation might be reached at an income of 300X. In this scenario, nobody could earn more than 150 times minimum wage, and manipulating the calculation of X to make the rich richer would also benefit everyone else.

A bigger challenge is that billionaire scum tend not to have income, only loans, so they don’t pay tax at all. But that’s also easily fixed if there’s political will.

When you play it louder the silences hit so much harder. What an experience.

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King.

It’s just exploding with creativity and craftsmanship throughout the album. The opening tune (21st Century Schizoid Man) was unlike anything anyone had ever heard at the time it was released, and there’s honestly still not much like it out there. And the transition to Moonchild after it is equally mind-blowing just for the contrast alone. The title track remains one of the most incredible things I’ve heard.

Zappa also has a lot of good candidates for this list. I’m soft for Freak Out, where the madness started, but some might argue something like Joe’s Garage is a better example.

Shoes. You don’t end up saving money and it’s not worth the pain. I tried for years back when I couldn’t afford a thing and concluded that there’s simply no such thing as cheap good shoes.