Personally, I think it's great. It's a smaller community than HN and the registration requirements, whilst not a perfect solution, do create a litmus test and ultimately creates an envrionment of mostly high quality posting.

To get in, you need to be invited in by an existing user. If you don't know anybody, you can hang around on their IRC channel and once you're familiar, somebody may be willing to invite you.

She was 89 and no doubt lead a truly fulfilling life, and so I think objectively it's not a sad passing - she had a truly remarkable life and long life.

That said, she was a significant part of my childhood, and always on the television in the various households I've lived in for one show or another. It feels like losing a beloved grandmother, and I'm devastated. RIP Maggie.

Five-a-side football (soccer). I'm not a sporty person, but started going with a local group a few years ago and have reaped the benefits of doing some intensive team exercise once per week. I go with a bunch of guys way older than I am, and it's amazing how fit and healthy they are compared to the average person I meet of their age. I certainly plan to keep this up so long an injury doesn't prevent me.

I really admire her after seeing this. She is so dialled in to what's going on in her working area, and she doesn't get flustered when probed with follow-up questions. Regardless of party, we could do with more people like her running and being elected as MPs - but I imagine she wouldn't even consider it.

You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what's been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I'll even throw a post up myself once in a while.

But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It's fine on very small rooms where it's almost analagous to a forum because there's little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.

Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called "The Lounge" which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.

Yes! The concepts are intertwined. I think the key take away, for me, is to lean heavily into your type system and allow that to do some of the heavy lifting. Accept that something like a username is not a string, but a subtype of a string (this has to be true if any validation is required, otherwise you'd just accept any valid string).

It's one of my favourites. Something I revisit every couple of years.

Care to give a summary on why you think they should be blocked ahead of any bad acting? Yes, there is some concern about Meta attempting EEE, but ultimately they're a large platform that can bring a lot of users and attention to the Fediverse. There's nothing preventing large instances from blocking them down the line, and with user level instance blocking coming in 0.19 to Lemmy (not sure if Mastodon et al have something similar), you can block them personally yourself if you wish, rather than having that thrust upon you by your instance admins.

Yes. I get the idea, because federating with them is the "negative" option, but honestly it's just confusing and overly opinionated for an infographic.

I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don't really like it, and I certainly don't trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn't Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

It's really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety...) thrown in, as Google's results are just better.

DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don't have to do that with Google.

Kagi has caught my attention lately. I'm going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I'm not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it's paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I'm not really getting that anywhere else either, I'm more hoping that it will just provide good search results.

I get it with the others, but given what Google is currently trying to do with Chrome and the open web, I think the Firefox evangelism is the least sinful of these by far. Or maybe I just became part of the problem.

To those who have been recommending Florisboard in this thread: Thank you. I've longed for a good FOSS keyboard, but always found they lacked enough features that I was willing to compromise and stick with gboard. Florisboard, using the latest beta from IzzyOnDroid, absolutely hits the mark already. It's missing a few features, like word autosuggest, but I can live without that for a while.