Liam Mayfair

Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.

The BBC reported this 2 hours after this was posted: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwl0v4w5j3o

Just use Google Docs then. Yes, it’s Google. Yes, it will somewhat tie you into their ecosystem but Google Docs are free, get regular updates and are pretty good overall. I’ve been using Google Docs for many years now. I occasionally use Office365 for work and Google Docs is just as good, if not better.

And my bow!

Don’t confuse authoritarian regimes with fascism. China is an authoritarian state running a diluted version of communism, but it’s not fascist. Russia under Putin is leaning more towards fascism these days for sure, but they’re not fascist outright yet.

Maybe what the hexbear folks gravitate around the most is the idea of authoritarianism. The flavour doesn’t matter as much.

Try this engine

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Or a SearXNG instance

https://search.disroot.org/search

You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.

Finally, not quite what you asked but here’s a freebie, in case you didn’t know about it:

https://wiby.me/

It’s an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.

Not even that, the author just uses WINE.

I love it when real news report headlines sound like an article from The Onion.

Voyager. I tried a few others but Voyager has a very slick UI and all the features I want.

The guy who started Bluesky was the same Twitter co-founder who push for Twitter to sell out. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stick with Mastodon. It’s getting real comfy in there now.

I rely on Google Search far less now than I used to for this reason. People had already gotten Google SEO down to a science and were poisoning search results very effectively. This AI-generated bullshit is taking it to a whole new level.

I’ve decided to use alternative search engines like DDG, SearXNG, etc. hoping their indexing criteria will be different enough current SEO techniques won’t affect them as much… For now.

XD

Still, the use of cookies as key elements used to persist client session identifiers in the browser is too widespread and relied upon by prevalent web powerhouses like PHP for Google to do away with them.

Moreover, as much as there may be more modern, sleek alternatives like browser session and application storage, you can’t realistically expect the entire web industry to completely migrate away from cookies just like that.

Glad to see stability and QoS being prioritised over throughput this time around. I feel like once WiFi broke through the 300 Mbps barrier with the 5GHz band, strictly focusing on further improvements in throughput would just yield diminishing returns for most people.

However, latency and signal strength have been notoriously annoying long-term problems that I’m happy to see finally being acknowledged.

I welcome this change. It makes it clear to the user in realistic terms how they want to engage with the site.

• Pay up with your money
• Pay up with your data
• Don’t use Facebook

I despise Meta and all their products but they are entitled to charge people for them. Shit ain’t free to run, you know.

I’d much sooner they showed this banner and force people to make a decision than what they’ve been doing up until now, which is to “assume” everyone’s fine with their personal data being harvested and exploited without their knowledge or consent.

Lol, knowing our boy Elon, he would’ve managed to run Parler to the ground even harder than they could ever dream

The x.com domain was originally purchased by PayPal for over $8m back when Elon was still at the company. No one knows how much PayPal asked Elon for it back in 2017 when he bought it from them, but it was rumoured to be an eight digit figure.

The younger voters are indeed pushing fascism, at least in Spain. I had also assumed ultraconservative, nationalist movements would be more popular with the older demographic in Spain but, proving my point that it’s those who didn’t experience Franco’s dictatorship who are buying into the far-right ideals, Vox voters are on average 8 years younger than voters of other parties in the country (apologies for the link to Spanish media).

I don’t know if this is any different in other countries but in Spain the people swallowing the fascist pill are very much your archetypical white, privileged, young male.

Making short-sighted decisions to obtain results quickly is just human nature.

Fascists, populists and demagogues exploit this flaw in human nature to rise up. They promise big things using big words to masses of people who are uneducated, jaded, or both.

Some people in Spain, like in many other countries right now (USA, Greece, Italy…) are turning to fascism because they feel squeezed dry and let down (unemployment, Covid economic hangover, inflation, etc.) by their current governments, so they run to the people sat in the opposite (or most extreme) end of the political spectrum hoping they can turn things around.

With such a simplistic, binary mindset, coupled with a younger generation of voters who have not experienced what it’s like to live in a fascist country, it’s no wonder fascism and belligerent nationalism are gaining traction in the West. I just hope we can turn things around before more European countries follow on Hungary’s steps.