According to some people on the fediverse, the Kagi forum thread that is linked in the toots I posted above and seemingly nowhere else.

From a non political standpoint: I tried Kagi last year and it was ok but I didn’t get the big deal. And because I’m not in the US but the UK if you try searching where’s my nearest garage or stay the nearest result came up as 150 miles away. So it’s one of those things I’ll maybe return to it once it’s developed a bit more

The sources I find are solely from mastodon threads, and date from this month and the Brave thing. This is the best thing I’ve found

https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707573907442638

Love his Thursday Next books to bits!

What if this is the afterlife of a religion we don’t know about from our previous existence?

I don’t think you can have a rational reply to your question - it’s all head canon

The worst thing to do would be an inorganic botch job on here to fill a gap when there’s no need, you can read that content elsewhere.

Anyway, it’s not an automatic guarantee of engagement or interaction. It’s purely a hack move.

I’m happy to use Reddit if I feel I can’t find anything to read on Kbin. You are allowed to use both you know?

I mean yeah I vape, that makes sense because it wasn’t the nicotine itself which was killing my lungs.

Apparently nicotine itself is as bad for you as caffeine, the worst thing about it is it’s insanely addictive without giving much of a high or anything in return…

That’s a very black and white way of putting it. As long as you’re an adult who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and you’re not spending hours obsessed with it I don’t think it’s unhealthy. The way you phrase ‘avoid it completely’ makes it sound like you’re going out of your way to avoid it already.

(I think the problems are coming through with the generation being ‘brought up on porn’, and thinking real sex is like it is in the videos online but that’s a different story really.)

Can cigarettes be used in a healthy way? Eh, only in very specific scenarios

Gonna have to bite and ask what very specific scenarios smoking could be healthy?

Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.

He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.

It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own

I just started using it for Android the last month or so when Chrome dropped the flag feature that let you toggle dark mode for websites with system dark mode.

I have a VPN with an adblocker so that aspect of Chrome never bothered me so much. Chrome felt like it worked slightly smoother but at the end of the day a browser is a browser and Firefox does the job. (Samsung’s browser is actually surpringly good for those with a Samsung device looking for a Chrome alternative)

Firefox does seem more trustworthy overall, although I’ve learned by now that trusting tech companies is not a sensible thing to do.

Still use Google search, but switched out Chrome for Firefox recently and it’s working out well. I do still use their calendar, docs apps but I’ve never been a big one for YouTube. I do have some Google speakers though and use Maps all the time - so I guess out of big tech Google is the one I’m suckered into the most…

Stopped using Facebook around 2016 and deleted my Twitter account a few years before that, basically when the novelty had long gone and it all seemed to be more toxic.

In the UK around that time it was just everyone going on about Brexit on Facebook but even before then people weren’t sharing stuff about themselves (with good reason) so it was just low effort memes). Use Facebook once in a blue moon to get in touch with really old friends

Didn’t miss either, although I recently signed up to Mastodon more just to see how the fediverse worked over there.

Then Reddit - probably the social media I was most invested in just because it was so granular in it’s There’s A Sub For That ability to cater for virtually all interests. But the utter disdain they held for their own volunteers and the contempt they seem to hold virtually everyone in was a bit of a wake up call. I do go back and check on it but I’m finding that I check on it less. Fedi has less content so I am reading all those eBooks I should have been reading instead!

My son is 7, I’m interested in how things are looking in 5 year’s time when he’s an early teen. He’s already got bored of watching YouTube videos, tiktok isn’t really a thing with us or anyone we know yet… time will tell I suppose. The main thing will be constant reminders that porn isn’t real and cyber security lectures

Another vote for Kbin here - the atmosphere seems so much more chilled from what I’ve heard and seen on Lemmy. The feddit instances also seem pretty cool.

Sorry this weird stuff is happening to you

What you stand to when I tell you to soldier, if you’ve quite finished asking questions!

What if they realised they’d made a very stupid decision and if there’d been some more checks and balances that decision could have been avoided?

The Third Reich, I think we can all agree was totalitarian. Hitler wanted to plunge into a war on two fronts against the USSR drunk on victory against France and expecting to beat Britain. Most of his military advisors weren’t keen. But being a Dictator he could just do it and hey presto war against Stalin. As time went on he got more erratic, made more random millitary decisions overruling his generals and made a pigs ear of things but whatever decision he made on a whim happened straight away anyway.

That’s just a famous and obvious example of a totalitarian leader rushing into things and getting where he wanted to go faster which didn’t end well for the leader.

When I was a kid we used to have audiobooks in the car on long car journeys and that was brilliant.

But at some point I lost that part of my brain which can retain information like that because even if I know I’m finding the story interesting, these days I’m more likely to find my mind wandering and thinking about what to cook, other things that need doing and I just can’t get it. I think maybe because I’m quite a fast reader it’s a bit of a slower pace and my brain is waiting for them to hurry up.

What I do like though on audible is there’s lots of dramas and comedies, usually from BBC but not always. So on commutes I’ll listen to that sort of thing and it keeps me engaged.

But different things work for different people. I am definitely someone who takes in written information better whether it’s reading for pleasure or work stuff

Yeah I’m a man but I have a wife and quite a few friends with medium to large chest extensions and I do not envy them - the inconvenience looks like a right pain in the hole. I find running for a bus bad enough in the morning without having to worry about things getting out of control up there. Unless you’re planning on being stationary a lot (basically not doing day to day activities) you’re going to need support for those things.

My wife keeps trying to arrange a free bra fitting at M&S but it seems like that’s a high demand service…

The Kbin social API hasn’t been released yet. When it is you’ll be able to use it ‘properly’.

I don’t know when that will be though…

Reading Venemous Lumpsucker because it was in the news recently as winning an award. It’s very funny, a satire on Corporate Business and climate change. It actually reminds me of when I read Stark by Ben Elton as a young teen in many ways - it’s more inventive but there’s a similar vibe (the world is helpless in the hands of corporate greed because corporate people just don’t know what else to do).

2/3 of the way through and it’s definitely easy to read and funny

Possibly not lol! The character motivation obviously develops throughout the book (I forget his name), but I’d say the focus is on the extremely weird things he sees and what he has to do to survive. I don’t remember there being much in the way of emotional development though.

I don’t know how far you got before stopping. I think they are definitely well written books - but I definitely have to be in the right headspace to enjoy them

I like the first but it is very heavy on world building at the expense of anything else - I guess in some respects you could apply that to the series as a whole to an extent.

I haven’t read the whole series btw, just guessing that from the ones I have read