The algorithmic feed and the low barrier to entry, including UX familiarity.

Aside from the headache of understanding what instances are and choosing one, and finding a decent mobile client, a lot of people care about unique usernames - especially those in the business/professional sphere.

I see their point, when @trustedname@genuine-instance can have all their effort and goodwill destroyed in a day by @trustedname@malicious-instance. While the Verification option exists, more needs to be done in ActivityPub and client developer guidelines to prevent or intuitively mitigate this kind of impersonation. But mentioning such shortcomings get sneered at or waved away, which keeps serious well-meaning people away.

Why would they go through that hassle when Bluesky’s shortcomings are ideological and potential future direction?

I’ve been with them for 6 years and haven’t looked back.

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is a valid strategy.

they’d surely stop stealing everybody’s water for bottling. If it isn’t profitable, they wouldn’t do it.

I don’t think they would. It’s far more likely that they’d “work with” governments to make boycotting their product illegal.

One example: anti-BDS laws regarding Israeli goods, especially in the US.

This is social media, not a magic 8-ball simulator. 😄

With zero context of you and your circumstances, you’re only going to get responses equal in value to rolling a die or flipping a coin.

To add to this, for those of you in roles that deal with email, think of every time you’ve dealt with a vendor or partner who’ve told you to “just whitelist *@<our-domain> - it’s not in the contract or terms of service, but it’s a requirement”.

The correct, considered and professional answer is, of course, “Fuck off and die.” Without exception, equivocation or apology.

This site is one such example, but at a B2C rather than B2B level.

Waiting for Spez to weigh in with his typical subtlety and even-handedness… 🍿

I think you’ve misunderstood few things in my reply. I’ll clarify…

First, I meant the person with multiple IM clients will be the one who “doesn’t see the problem” with WhatsApp (or whatever). The person moving to Signal just has Signal.

Second, I wasn’t saying you used a fallacy. I was pointing out that when someone thinks of using (or are recommended to use) another IM client, they almost always think they have to uninstall what they’re currently using. (It is more accurate to call it a false dichotomy.) It’s a mystery to me why people think this way about IM clients, as many of us have multiple browsers installed, for example.

Third, my reply was about those you communicate with online, not you. Nothing in my reply was directed at you. 😊

This is pretty close to how I did it.

The “one or the other” thing is a fallacy. You have just one, but they’re clearly happy installing stuff like WA - so tell them to install another app. It’s not like they have to switch.

If they subsequently come to realise the value of Signal in time, all the better.

Possibly, on both counts. I know the Guardian and BBC News style guides use that convention.

Yet there’s this regarding the AP Style Guide:

https://grammarmill.com/ap-style-rule-for-acronyms/

It mentions odd rules like “if an acronym is longer than 5 characters” and such.

Either way, my money’s on an internal style guide that Microsoft (in OP’s example) requires its staff to use.

Me too.

People learn from reading that kind of thing. Aside from it being unnecessary and confusing, there’s going to be a percentage of people who’ll think “Ascii” (or whatever) is a name rather than an abbreviation.

They probably have a style guide, as most media outlets do, that says pronounceable acronyms/initialisms are to be written like a name and the rest as everyone expects.

So you get Ascii, Unix and Nasa alongside IBM and PCMCIA.

The core of what you’re saying has been my approach for many years. Never go “all in” on anything.

Convenience is one thing (to me, but it’s everything to so many), but it’s just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.

I played around with this some time ago, until I thought more about it: using tools like this makes adtech money.

Adtech doesn’t care if you’re interested in X or Y, just that they can charge the advertiser for it. By injecting fake traffic, they’re getting more data to sell.

Spotify is AFAIK Swedish

It was started in Sweden where its operations are still based, but it’s headquartered in Luxembourg and it chose to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Luxembourg screams “tax efficiency” to me, so their list of pre-IPO investors must be quite the thing.

Dunno why you’re getting down voted.

I visited Israel 10-odd years ago for work and I loved it. Beautiful country and people… if you ignore all the politics. As with the US.

What I hated while there was the demonisation of everything Palestinian. It’s like a cult: if you don’t agree, you’re one of them. (Get fucked).

I encounter this mostly with manga. (I’ll not rehash what others have said).

FWIW, and in that use case, I deal with it by renaming x5 to x5.0 so it will sort before x5.5. And then usually put both into an x5 directory and then zip that into a CBZ.

Agreed.

• Upvote: Adds to the community.
• Downvote: Doesn’t belong in this community.

Hosting your own email server is a challenge, as DMARC, SPF and random hand waving by email companies (who should know better) make it needlessly problematic.

There’s also the issue of whether your home ISP allows inbound email ports (25/tcp, etc). A lot don’t.

It’s possible(?) a hosting provider can do decent email, but I tend to think of that like 1990s-era ISPs who provided email: liable to be discontinued at any time with little/no notice and not portable.

But it’s your call. Good luck.

Many email providers have an inbuilt tool that will handle all this for you.

Fastmail, for example. I switched to them 4-5 years ago, and the process of migrating over a decades worth of mail was straightforward and pretty quick.

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/migrate-to-fastmail/