One more vote for ChatGPT. I use it all the time to get me pointed in the right direction, or to start fleshing out an algorithm. It’s a great starting place.

Good bot!

Just checked out cohost. Looks cool and thanks for the tip.

I personally think the best way to use discord is to create a server and invite people to it as you meet them online. For me, it’s gaming that connects me with people. My wife and I meet people that we like and want to play with more, and so we invite them. This usually results in getting invited to other small community servers.

It’s interesting that you say that because I have trouble finding content that I like on all microblogging platforms : Mastodon, X, threads and all. If you crack the code, let me know.

Discord is built for gaming. Discord allows you to stream a game directly to a channel with one click. Discord allows for fine control over users in the server and what they are allowed to do. Signal doesn’t really have these features, and I’m guessing it’s becsuse the purpose is slightly different.

The closest privacy focused alternative to discord that I know of is Matrix. I’m thinking of moving my discord server where my friends and I play together over to Matrix. We will lose some features but gain some privacy.

I think there are discord clones that work very much like discord, but I’m not aware of their privacy focus. Revolt comes to mind : https://revolt.chat

I used this video as a guide and it worked: https://youtu.be/WtFBrB4XqBc?si=635fN0fa7jN77evj

This disables the YouTube shorts suggestions, which is how I would get sucked into watching shorts all the time. You can still go to shorts if you want, but I guarantee you will mostly forget about them with the suggestions disabled. Shows how little value they really give.

I literally had to disable YouTube shorts. My life improved significantly when I just didn’t have shorts thrown in my face constantly.

The problem with YouTube is that is so easy to just default to letting it feed your brain. Frequently it’s not even enjoyable, it’s just straight distraction from anything meaningful. On the flip side, YouTube can be the absolute best place to learn anything.

Hehe… magic dick.

None of my friends in the United States would say such things either. Must be some really whack friends.

I don’t get the whole twitter-like microblogging thing. Mastodon feels kind of strange to me because it’s similar to that. I try to find a cool place to hang out there, but it always feels like a waste. But YouTube… the amount of time I give YouTube… lol

In response to the first article: The whole point of brave was privacy-respecting ads, which is something I can get behind. The article doesn’t mention much in terms of how they are selling data that is connected to you. Adding affiliate links to the url–not a great idea but also not a huge offense to me. I see very little substance to critique this part of Brave in the article.

The rest of the article is about associations Brave has with other “bad” people and “bad” things. These are not real arguments for why the actual software is not good. Saying Brave promoted FTX doesn’t really mean that Brave is evil. Not everyone knew what was going on there. Again, I don’t see much substantive critique of Brave on this front.

For the second article: I very much don’t like it when software decides to install other software that I’m not aware of. Big mistake for Brave.

Sorry–it was sarcasm.

My wife and I run a very active discord server. I created it for the friends that we have made playing video games, and so we just all play games together and chat on there. It wasn’t a server that I’ve really advertised to random people; it’s just for people that we end up playing with.

Why not IRC? I mean, if you want private conversation, then that’s not your place. But for a community? Not sure I see a huge problem with it. I love the idea of XMPP as a better IRC, but I never found a place to hang out there. What do you think?

Hey I’m here for it. Thanks for the link–I’ll add you to my feed.

Tildes is a new one to me. It looks quite a bit smaller. How do you like it there?

I use a service called Inoreader. It’s an RSS reader that can be used on the browser, iOS and android. The free version allows you like 150 feeds or something like that with a lot of functionality. There’s really no reason to buy the service.

You just either search the blog in the inoreader search bar. Or, in the case of smaller blogs (which is where I like to spend most of my time), you just look for a link to their RSS feed somewhere on the website. Below is a screenshot of what an example RSS feed link looks like.

I used to get on 4chan about 13 years ago. From my experience, it was a cesspool even way back then—but mostly on random. There were some other communities that were really cool. I kind of wish that was still a thing