dan

What do they do?

Firefox containers? (that’s what I did to manage my alts on Reddit)

There’s so much bindweed and ivy coming from the neighbour’s gardens choking everything, and it’s just about as much as I can manage just to keep that under control so it’s a bit of a mess atm.

However I’ve kept a little patch in the middle of the garden unmowed (for the bees) and that’s got all sorts growing in it now and looks pretty nice.

Oof

Didn’t IBM create the punchcard machines the nazis used to catalogue Jews? Genocide counts, right?

It’s fairly reasonable to assume advertisers are leaving. This isn’t one of those controversies that has two sides, it’s just Reddit being shitty because they want to make more money, and mods, users and disabled people on the other side being annoyed with Reddit.

There’s very little for advertisers to lose by redirecting their ad budget elsewhere, but if they stick around there’s a risk that annoyance spills over to them.

It also doesn’t take much for marketing teams to make a change - they do it all the time to stay on the right side of controversies and avoid things they don’t want to be associated with.

Yeah all that information disappearing is a huge disappointment.

But realistically while Reddit Inc own that data it was always going to happen eventually. If it wasn't the demand from LLMs pushing them to lock it away so they can monetise it, it'd have been a move like Twitter blocking non logged in users, or just them purging old data to save money or something.

Basically you want one primary usenet service, doesn’t really matter what (they all have pros and cons but for a normal users they’re basically the same), and another secondary service on a separate backbone (see https://whatsmyuse.net) to get good coverage without being hurt too hard by takedowns.

It’s kinda not cool in the usenet world to recommend specific services because there’s so much shilling going on. I’ll tell you what I use but please don’t take it as a specific recommendation. No affiliation with any of these.

For indexers I use nzb.su and drunkenslug. The former seems to have better coverage but the latter is faster. I hear nzbfinder is good too.

I use frugalusenet but only cos I got a deal that makes it $34/year. It comes with a free secondary block account on a second backbone so it’s kinda helpful in that way. But overall coverage isn’t as good as two well chosen providers. They often post good deals to Reddit/etc so keep your eyes open for a good one (Black Friday is a good time)

Or it could be a really fucking great year. It could mark the end of commercialised social media and the beginnings of truly widespread adoption of free and open alternatives.

They’re all jumping to get their bad news out while there’s a lot of other drama going on, in the hopes it’ll go less noticed.

A good quality usenet server.

A good silent tactile low profile switch is the holy grail for many. Something like a low pro boba u4 would be incredible.

Tape mod plus oring mod can get you close to silent, but the feel isn’t great - too mushy for me. I haven’t tried that with sunsets though, might be better.