For real. This one got me the best:

“We held a meeting and decided being radically open about gender while adopting a puritanical outlook on sex was the best way to shock Boomers to death.”

Amazing self-own admitting that the internet and public schools are your ideological enemies:

According to Boreing: “Kids go to school for 40 hours a week and then they engage in pop culture for 40 more hours every week. That means for 80 hours of a child’s week, you are turning them over to the left. A good parent might spend 15 minutes a day in meaningful conversation with their kids … A great parent might take their kid to church for one hour, or two hours, or three hours a week. The other 80, they’re watching Disney … they’re online … they’re in public schools.”

Even their non-political statements are political. I hate that some people don’t see through this shit:

In a video statement on Monday marking Bentkey’s launch, Boreing said: “Bentkey isn’t about teaching kids politics, it’s about childhood and wonder and adventure. It’s about values and all of the things on which politics are built later.”

“We no longer support inclusivity and science.”

I definitely didn’t learn this in social studies

From their mastodon:

so my goal with sup. is to make a federated snapchat/whatsapp that is compatible with most platforms. This was originally going to be a Pixelfed specific Messenger-like app, but then it hit me - this is a perfect opportunity to create a sub project that could be eventually handed over to a trusted org.

Seems like a fine ambition but Pixelfed is still in beta and buggy as hell. I’d like to see that improve (so that more people will want to use it) first.

You’re right, your IP is anonymized after 1 week. Their privacy policy seems great to me. I just turn off uBlock origin for Ecosia and don’t mind quickly scrolling past a couple of ads at the top of results.

It’s my firefox default search and I rack up a ton of trees for doing many quick and basic searches. If I ever need a more complex search, I use a different site. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing commitment.

What will the next social media trend be? Seems like the centralized options are done for (FB, TW, Reddit), but they’re not being replaced by any single solutions. Tiktok took mainly genZ. Professionals have been wanting a twitter replacement to move to since musk and have yet to figure it out (bluesky, tribel, post social, takes, mastodon, etc has no apparent frontrunner). Political apps segmented some off like parler and the right stuff. Decentralized and foss apps have all kinds of solutions but won’t likely ever attract a huge crowd. So are we seeing the end of of an era of massive centralized social media?

Headsets already feel outdated. They seem inconvenient, uncomfortable, and take you away from life instead of enhancing it. Whatever happened to google glass? I disliked that for many reasons but at least it wasn’t a headset.

Their answers there do make it sound like clicks are necessary, but it’s my understanding that each search query also has a fixed rate. Advertisers pay for both clicks and impressions. That’s why everyone gets a tree counter that goes up for just searching. Granted it’s a very small earning for impressions, which is why it takes ~50 searches for a single tree.

Do you remember any source for Hitchens on that, like a book or speaking event? I’d enjoy hearing more about that specifically.

Same, I’ve just been hoping that I’m seeing all the content and it’s back to normal now

I've been using it for 3 months and enjoy it too. It's especially nice that you can add new books to the database yourself. In Goodreads you had to join a group, message the admins, and pray to Odin. It's great that Bookwyrm copies over your Goodreads books and reviews. At the moment I rarely visit the site, only to bulk-post book reviews, check my feed, and see who's on the discover page. Like my experience with all federated stuff so far, people there are more quiet, private, and reserved, which doesn't lend super well to a review database. So I still check a book's reviews on Goodreads before getting it.

I was happy to find an alternative though. Distancing from Amazon is for the best, and to make it easier Goodreads recently went through an awful design change. Everything on the page is bigger, more book data is hidden, and some data disappeared completely. They also refuse to make a dark mode and have a buggy app. Bookwyrm being federated with the ability to boost reviews is nice too.

What’s EEE?

Yes I mark mine up, surprised so many here don’t. I used to be a person that never did, but heard some people on podcasts highly recommend it, and I also began wanting to take notes. I think it adds value to the book on a re-read if you do it cleanly. I underline the first and last word of the highlight, with a curly bracket in the margin to indicate the area (sometimes a comment added), and a small plus sign in the top right corner to indicate which pages are noted. Then I can flip through when finished and dictate the notes to my computer. But they also make sticky tabs for page notes if you don’t wanna mark books up. I do have some visual or big coffee table books, like Poor Charlie’s Almanack, that I don’t want to mark up inside.

You're bang on about Amazon seeing Goodreads as a utility rather than a social site for users. What's nice about book reviews is that they help summarize and clarify your own thinking. So even if no one reads it, it's a net positive. I think many of us value reviews by everyday people over critics and personalities as well.

The question everyone’s dying to know