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    1. What are some traditional internet forums that you still use?

      I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to...

      I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to replicate or improve on Twitter. I never used or cared for Twitter in the first place.

      I found TrekBBS which looks great, but I was wondering about similar forums for my other interests, such as science fiction literature, classic movies, etc.

      So I am curious to know about everyone's favorite old-school forums that are still active and cool!

      The websites are not required to be actually old, as long as they work similarly to traditional internet forums.

      57 votes
    2. I hate 2FA

      I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app....

      I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app. Repeat this process for every single account, over and over.

      I know there are tools like YubiKey that are supposed to make 2FA easier, but the reality is that most websites don’t even support them.

      I already use a password manager, and all my passwords are long, randomized, and secure. Is there something I am missing that makes this easier, or is this just as infuriating for everyone else?

      75 votes
    3. I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one.

      I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world...

      I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

      Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

      There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

      Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

      I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.


      These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

      • Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

      • As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

      • Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.


      That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

      There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

      Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

      If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

      162 votes
    4. How would you moderate this scenario?

      I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community. We have a section...

      I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

      We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

      Let the train hit:
      a) Nintendo developers
      b) Sony developers
      c) Microsoft developers

      Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

      A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

      Now that really threw me.

      The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

      As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

      Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

      I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

      20 votes
    5. Highlighting text in Wikipedia scrolls up too fast?

      To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it. I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading...

      To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it.

      I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading it. I always did that and it helps me to read a lot faster and to relax my eyes while reading. It's something i don't think i can get rid of, even if I tried, it's just so deeply burned in.
      As well I use to scroll the text I'm reading to the top out of the same reasons or maybe it's just habit as well, but I realised I cannot get rid of it as well :-)

      So no to my problem:
      Usually this works flawless, i can highlight text and have the cursor where I'm reading in the topmost visible line. But for some strange reason this does not work in the "new" wikipedia layout. where if I highlight text in the upper third of the page it scrolls upwards quite fast which just fucks up everything and makes my day bad. (this behaviour is not present in the old design which e.g. the germand wikipedia still uses)

      Is it me?
      Is it my browser?
      Is there a way to get rid of this, so I can keep my workflow while reading and learing on wikipedia? Is somebody else observing this behaviour?
      Where can I even start to look for a solution? I don't even know what to look for.

      It truly bothers me, as I'm close to every day on it, and it might be my favorite website.
      I heard there is a way to switch to the old wikipedia layout, which might be a workaround. But I actually like the new Layout a lot, so if there is a way to avoid that it would be great :-)

      18 votes
    6. To those who have been trying out Kagi: what do you think of it?

      It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up. To...

      It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

      To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

      What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

      Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?


      Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

      54 votes
    7. Walled gardens, privacy, SEO and the open internet

      Hey all! So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is...

      Hey all!

      So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

      I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

      How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

      13 votes
    8. Is anyone else kind of scared by the internet?

      I don't mean that I'm scared by some terrible content on the internet, or that I'm actually afraid of using it. What I mean is the same feeling I often get from open-world games: FOMO, a sense of...

      I don't mean that I'm scared by some terrible content on the internet, or that I'm actually afraid of using it. What I mean is the same feeling I often get from open-world games: FOMO, a sense of chaos, being lost and lacking direction.

      Internet is inherently like an open-world game. There's so much content available. In your entire life, you won't see even 0.001% of it. This very post will probably be seen by like 100 people at most, which is such a tiny share of all internet users.

      I get very anxious thinking about this. People often talk about how they miss "the old internet", which consisted of small websites and had to be explored. To me, that sounds like hell. I don't want to explore internet. I want to know where something is and how to find it. Information is on Wikipedia. Opinions are on Reddit. Et cetera. But the internet doesn't work like that - there's so much stuff that I don't even know how to grasp it.

      I recently discovered https://are.na because someone mentioned it here on Tildes. I signed up, and immediately got that feeling. There's a huge amount of content, and I'm supposed to just explore in until I stumble upon something?

      Tildes is one of the few websites where I don't feel that, because the amount of content is relatively small so I have a feeling of keeping it under control. But it also makes me think about how there are countless other small communities like Tildes, and ones that I'll never be aware of - and that's also pretty scary.

      Does anyone else feel something similar? I've seen many people talk about similar feelings regarding keeping up with social media, but that doesn't actually bother me, but the amount of communities that can be explored does

      35 votes
    9. Is the age of opportunity for "hustlers" with morals on the internet over?

      This is more of an incoherent chain of consciousness from a lot of the thoughts I've had about being online over the past 20~ years. I welcome discussion and thoughts about the points I make in...

      This is more of an incoherent chain of consciousness from a lot of the thoughts I've had about being online over the past 20~ years. I welcome discussion and thoughts about the points I make in this post, optimism is appreciated as I've almost none left for this. (For context for the older folks on this forum, I'm not going to be getting into pre-2006 internet as I wasn't around to experience much of it. I know the internet has a very rich and storied past from before that period of time, but the vast vast vast majority of people didn't "get online" until after this period of time)

      As we hurtle headlong into 1/4th of the way through the century, I've been looking back on the earlier years of the internet and missing a lot of it. Sure there were a lot of rough edges and problems, but I'd argue that would be true of any period of time for any large group of people. One thing that always stuck out to me in the past was how much the used to reward innovation, creativity, and hard work. Youtube, Twitch, Reddit, even platforms like Twitter and Facebook; they all felt a lot smaller and a lot more approachable for the amateur with some ambition. So many of the success stories you heard from around that era were just seemingly normal guys and gals who had some talent and drive and put in effort and made it big. Obviously there's some confirmation bias there, you don't hear the 1000 stories from the people who tried and failed, but I don't think you can deny that the "barrier to entry" was a lot lower back then in pretty much every field. I've gotten to know the founder of the company I work for, and he started it out of his house with a few friends from college and created what would be considered today to be a pretty basic product, and they managed to turn it into a 200~+ million dollar business in just over 10 years. Most of the stories I've heard are like that, just a guy or a couple guys sitting down and working on something over the course of a few months and striking it big off of it.

      Now let's get to the point of this post, to me it feels like those success stories have slowed to a trickle, if not stopped completely. The amount of competition there is in every field is insane. Are you a fairly talented digital artist looking to make a little extra cash on the side? 10-15 years ago, you could easily get commissions for things like Twitch emotes, personal portraits, (drawing furry OCs), etc. Nowadays I don't know a single amateur artist who can find a reliable source of clients who are willing to pay any reasonable amount of money, and this was before AI took over the low hanging fruit for pennies on the dollar.

      I'm going to continue to draw on personal experience because that's the only field I feel like I can speak with some authority on. In the Youtube/Twitch scene, being a reasonably skilled video editor used to mean that you could make a decent (if meager) living and build up your reputation by editing for large creators. Editors became known for their styles and even became mini-celebrities in the communities that they were a part of. Now it feels like every large Youtuber/Streamer has a team of faceless, nameless production staff that handle all of the video management, thumbnails, analytics, etc. There's no personality anymore, there's no individuality; you're part of the business, a cog in the machine. The .00001% of people who manage to crawl their way to the top of creating videos or streaming content have hyper-optimized the process so finely that there is quite literally no room for a newcomer to enter the space and attract a crowd.

      I'll expand on that last paragraph a bit because I know that its not really 100% true, I see Youtubers and streamers every single day that I've quite literally never heard of before, and they have millions of subscribers; the platforms have never been more diverse. But one thing they all seem to have in common is that the production value and effort required to make their content is 100x the amount it was 10 years ago. You can't just put a handycam on a 10 dollar tripod in your bedroom and make it big on the internet anymore note: this is explicitly ignoring Tik Tok because I have no interest/experience with that platform, and from everything that I've heard, "tik tok fame" is so incredibly fleeting and transient that someone can go from being a celebrity to a nobody literally overnight. It's the tabloid magazines of internet content, just a flash in the pan for the vapid and dopamine-starved. It also seems like one of the most toxic and manipulated platforms out there, quite literally millions of people putting out actual trash into the ecosystem, throwing anything at the wall to see if it will stick. (for anyone who thinks I'm being too harsh on TikTok, I'm referring to the part of the platform that's all astroturfed sponsored trash like "omg check out this new water bottle I found that filters out negative energy in your water before you drink it" and the 1,000s of other scams that infest that godforsaken app. That TikTok rant got a little off-track but it just makes me so frustrated to see how hyper-consumerism, low effort, and morally bankrupt the "creators" of that platform are. It's all about the "grindset" and "hustling to make a quick buck." As long as you get your bag, who gives a fuck right?

      To circle back to some more context for why I'm making this post, I'm very active in the freelance/contractor space. A lot of my friends are/were creatives, freelancers, contractors from all sorts of fields; artists, sound designers, voice actors, video editors, website developers, app programmers, audio engineers, etc. I was talking to one of my friends about some of the projects they have been working on recently, and one of them was editing down a podcast for these two hustle-culture bros. The type of people who offer those $5,000 paid online courses on how to make "passive income" online; you know the type, I know you do. And the surprising thing to me was that these guys were actually "successful" they had suckers enrolling in their courses, they were making good money. You want to know what the one of the "hot tips for passive income" that they were using? They made AI generated "product review" videos on Youtube that would scrape Amazon product listings, and put together thousands of automated useless garbage videos a day and pump them onto any platform they could monetize. You ever try to look up a review for a fairly niche product to see if its any good, and all you can find is AI generated trash? Yeah, these are the types of people responsible. They have absolutely no morals, no respect for their audience, they will do anything it takes to make .0001 cents and completely flood the platforms they're on with worthless garbage making it unusable. It's the online equivalent of an industrial factory discharging thousands of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean a day to make a few hundred bucks from some boomers who can't tell that a video is worthless.

      I use this as an example because this is happening everywhere, in every field. It's not always AI, its not always worthless trash; but the almost universal truth everywhere I see is that every possible niche online is absolutely packed to the brim with a million other people and bots who will do whatever you do for much less money and time. Competition for human attention and money has completely exponentially skyrocketed and there is quite simply not enough to even begin to go around.

      If you stuck around through this rant and it resonated with you in any way, feel free to share your thoughts and opinions below. I ask that you don't just solely comment based on the title without reading at least some of the post. This is definitely coming from a negative headspace and I'm well aware that my personal experience may be skewed, but its so hard not to be cynical and jaded.

      35 votes
    10. Anyone interested in trying out Kagi?

      Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the...

      Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the invite-giver to reply to the comment of the invite-receiver to keep track?

      —-

      I received a link during Thanksgiving that lets me invite several people to a free trial of Kagi.

      I tried convincing friends to try it out but most of them were not even interested in a free trial to a paid search engine.

      If any of you are interested, please let me know.

      I'll give you my link in private and you can register yourself to the free trial.

      Posting just in case people are on the same boat as me.

      --

      Also, I hope it's appropriate to start a topic on this?
      Let me know if this is frowned upon.

      58 votes
    11. Tips for increasing online privacy (without going insane)?

      I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to...

      I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to make more improvements but I really have no idea how, it started with deleting socials and next thing you know I'm looking at LineageOS and de-googling.

      If anyone has any suggestions on where to go next while staying realistic/not going crazy, i would love to hear them. I am not really sure where to set my expectations, basically I would like to have more control of my data. The other day Google photos gave me a memory recap which kind of creeped me out! I am suddenly not fond of whatever is going on under the surface of Google photos that's making collages and trying to sell my photo books. Also g-board giving me a pop up in the text prediction row asking me to rate the app??? Ew.

      I am a fan of self hosting and run a small NAS (open media vault) but this too quickly turns into the privacy spiral and leaves me thinking I should throw my phone into a river and live in the forest. Would love to hear your thoughts/advice/opinions!

      54 votes
    12. What are your forgivable sins?

      The user @trim posted an interesting question in ~Tech and it made me wonder: what are my forgivable sins? What kinds of misdeeds on the part of companies that are suppliers of goods or services...

      The user @trim posted an interesting question in ~Tech and it made me wonder: what are my forgivable sins? What kinds of misdeeds on the part of companies that are suppliers of goods or services do I tacitly concience or to which I will turn a blind eye?

      Whenever there is a scandal, the easy answer is, "I don't know, but definitely not that." This, however, is just an ad hoc definition that can be applied to any unsavory revelation on the part of a service or product provider. What would I be left with? I couldn't retreat from society if I wanted to and the cost of commercial puritanism would be prohibitively high.

      What I realized in that topic was that (1) I will not sanction providers merely for doing business with others to whom I am opposed and (2) I will not sanction providers merely for issuing words or statements that I disagree with.

      That said, I'm curious about others. What are your criteria for bad behavior in a service or product provider that you would judge to be nonetheless admissible?

      20 votes
    13. What's the biggest YouTube channel still run by just one person?

      Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I wondered about this recently. I took three seemingly-solo Youtubers as examples at different scales. Penguinz0 has 16 mil subscribers, and as...

      Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I wondered about this recently. I took three seemingly-solo Youtubers as examples at different scales.

      Penguinz0 has 16 mil subscribers, and as far as I know his uploads are just him talking into the camera, giving his opinion about recent things in games and pop culture (I could be very wrong about that, I don't know why he's popular). Looks like he uploads at least a few times a week, so that could be manageable.

      Videogamedunkey has 7.5 mil subscribers, and he used to do weekly uploads until very recently, I think. Given that his humor and editing style is a big part of his content, I'd be surprised if he's got anyone else working on his vids.

      Northernlion has just over 1 mil subscribers and uploads multiple videos daily, and (in)famously refuses to do any editing. He just basically streams on Twitch all day and uploads clips from that.

      I would imagine the day-to-day running of the business, i.e. answering emails and phone calls, would be where having help is most advantageous as you grow, but it also probably depends a lot on what kind of content you make. How big can you get before it's too much for a solo operation?

      45 votes
    14. Looking for eclectic and little-known websites that bring joy

      Given the current state of things, I have been trying to avoid internet sites that could trigger anxiety. This is harder to do that I thought it would be. So I'm reaching out to the fine and...

      Given the current state of things, I have been trying to avoid internet sites that could trigger anxiety. This is harder to do that I thought it would be. So I'm reaching out to the fine and resourceful Tildes collective for links to sites that are less known, and may provide, if not joy, at least interest, uniqueness maybe, fun, or education? Stuff that may be comforting, engrossing, or diverting to give some respite to those of us who are feeling pretty crushed.

      Here are two sites I can offer, but I don't want to limit anyone's idea of what might be a good suggestion.

      Futility Closet "is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible." (description from their about page)

      Strange Company bills itself as "a Walk of the Weird Side of History"

      (edited to add links)

      60 votes