janguv

Doesn't look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they're generally not).

You can. Paysafecard bought with cash. Only issue is you have to use your normal IP to sign up with (not behind a VPN), though you could use a mobile one or a public one somewhere probably.

I love how the BBC is constantly labelled as having right wing bias by leftists and left wing bias by the far right. 😂😂🤣🤡🤣🤣😂

What's going on here is that the far right, consciously or not, conflates a kind of attenuated social liberalism and left wing progressivism. What it complains about (and greatly exaggerates) is the extent to which the cultural and creative programming features diversity, the comedy programming doesn't feature as much bigotry as it would like, and the daily programming (stuff like The One Show) always uses very neutral and PC language.

But this liberal sheen is largely a facade – the political and economic programming is astonishingly right wing, from Andrew Neil formerly hosting (while being chairman of the hard right Spectator), Kuenssberg lapping up and running Tory attack lines, the revolving door between BBC senior positions and the government, the panelling of Question Time and Newsnight, the strong editorial lean towards outdated austerity economics and immigration moral panics, the constant flirtation with right-wing think tanks, and so on. This would be a good introduction to the topic: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/253-the-bbc.

I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren't only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.

Can't stand Starmer but yeah it would be politically dim to make any sort of commitment on rejoining right now. Among other things, what sank Labour in GE19 (and not 17) was precisely their flirting with a second referendum and the unclarity of their Brexit policy (Starmer was, funnily enough, integral to both).

Always wondered how good the Remarkable series is. Have been tempted but the hardware isn't that cheap really. Since discovering the PDF reader of Zotero and running it with a night mode plugin, I've found myself mainly just wanting to use that. The annotations are stored separately as well, so you don't get massively inflated PDF filesizes (though if you want the option to export with embedded annotations, you can do that; you can also import embedded annotations to Zotero and then clear the file of them). Very cool.

There you go intentionally missing the point again.

So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That's so bizarre to me haha.

You're right that it mustn't be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn't also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of "free as in freedom" either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it's not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.

And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.

Oh really? That's surprising. Always been smooth for me and I much prefer the UX

Teams

shudders

Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.

Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.

Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.