SO many corporate/govt websites do this. My health insurance and credit card company do it. It's mind boggling. I always keep some variation of Chromium installed to deal with it and then go back to LibreWolf.

Hopefully this actually leads to something lasting, but I don't have high hopes considering how Europe is getting dragged atm

This kind of thing reminds me of historians who say peace is an exception in human history.

Nothing but end-times news these past couple of weeks.

As someone else said, you have to remain 100% private. The second you become publicly traded, that's it.

Even then, if you want to make a difference in an established industry, you all but require preexisting deep pockets or some extremely disruptive technology that can't be easily copied.

You then have to remain steadfast in the face of the ridiculous money that will be dangled in front of you to be bought out.

There's a lot of stars that need to align.

I will give this a shot!

To chime in on the user creation thing:

I think it's a natural part of decentralization that it's harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the "go-to" for general users.

Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it's just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.

World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)

Strongly second this.

There's been suspicions for a while that you can't actually unGoogle Chromium no matter how hard you try.

I really enjoy Vivaldi but I came to the conclusion that the only thing that really matters to me is vertical tabs.

LibreWolf is my daily driver now.

Objecting to alienation is lèse majesté, serfs! Labor for the labor god.

For me, it has been a process of accepting that we can't handwave actual opposing worldviews by talking about intelligence.

I know people who aren't "smart" by most definitions, but who still have a lot of empathy and kindness. On the other hand, I have peers who I consider geniuses in their interests and fields, but with whom I struggled to find common ground politically.

It's more useful to look at values. I can agree with most people in my life on the broad strokes. It's when we get bogged down with micropolitics that fights happen.

I still think the public reaction to Luigi Mangione was a prime example of how people actually agree about a lot in this country, but frame it differently.

Wish it ran decently on my machine.

P2 was a life changing experience.

Glenn, yes. Snowden I don't think so. My impression of him is that he wants to unite everyone against surveillance, and doesn't want other issues to get in the way of his messaging/work about that. I could be wrong.

It's worth at least giving it a try. My opinion is far from consensus. P2 is for the most part just a retelling of the Haruspex route with (VERY welcome) improvements, so you really won't be missing out on anything plot-wise.

I've heard people say it's better to start off with Bachelor because it's more grounded but I really don't think it's necessary. You're just gonna learn about some of the more exotic aspects of the universe before the more mundane ones.

I really don't know if you could.

Having seen OpenAI's trajectory of becoming a for-profit and not being "Open" in any serious sense of the word, I genuinely think market forces can absolutely pry open any chest they perceive as containing gold.

My personal conclusion is that you genuinely have to deal with human beings. Take federation for instance: we can try to decentralize these things and make an incredibly solid system, but we still depend on people coming to the realization that this is a good idea and adopting it for their personal/professional internet use.

Now I'm wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company? I can't think of anything beyond having subsidiaries in different countries, but that still requires a parent or at least a main point of contact in the form of the owner. So we're back to humans.

Definitely give it a shot! If you've been gaming for a long time, you might not mind it.

As far as writing is concerned, they're both amazing. I do think P1's mechanics are a little too janky, though some argue that just adds to the uneasiness and oddity of it. Personally I think it makes it a little inaccessible for most.

It really depends on the age of the sender.

30s and younger: Fairly dismissive response. Not outright insulting but pretty rude.

40s and older: genuinely meant as an earnest acknowledgement of your message.

Lovely bokeh!

Paper notebooks.

I fully believe we've come full circle in that technology was intended to sort out the mess of physical documents, bookkeeping etc, but now is inherently messier by itself and you should go back to pen and paper.