I finally made the move to setting up an account here and wean my reddit usage.

It’s getting so bad on there, so many bots, trolls, and paid agitators. Plus the uptick in fascist apologists. Smaller communities with higher bars to entry produce better conversation, in my experience.

In my experience these “containment” boards/servers/sections tend not to work.

Long term it basically just creates a place that attracts those you don’t want, and becomes place for those ideologies to spread. Then it either gets bad enough they take over (you know the site) or they break off wholesale and form a new community dedicated to those worst impulses (pyrrhic victory at best).

The best policy is to actively moderate, and in the case of the fediverse, defederate, those groups and those that give them shelter.

Unfortunately I don’t think Verbatim manufactures any quad-layer discs, so Sony was the only real option for 128GB disks.

Furthermore, M-Disc is still very pricey per-GB, and their non M-Disc BD disks aren’t priced that much better. I’ve also recently got a spindle of Verbatim BDXLs that every single one would fail to either write or read at the layer transitions, so having a single option here is already proving to be painful.

Somewhat out of scope for this specific article, but in the States’ a lot of cities only make announcements over Tw*tter or Facebook.

I was planning on going to a 4th of July parade with my family, and I only learned it was cancelled (wildfires) because somebody else told me, who was following there, the city website had no mechanism for this kind of news.

Which is really what I’d prefer to see, websites maintained for announcements, and if they want to also post that news on other social media they can use software to crosspost. Also RSS feeds for those who still use readers, plenty of ‘Content Management’ suites provide that functionality by default.

I’m really supportive of this kind of protocol. I’ve long advocated for some system that allowed for micro-payments to support websites, both optional and paywall. We’ve seen what the expectation of having “free” services has gotten us, I’d much prefer to chip in to sites that provide me enjoyment or are informative.

Seconding this, while I have the option for multi-gig at my address, I don’t have the need, once you get around gigabit upload speeds life is fine.

I can upload hours of uncompressed gameplay to YouTube in under an hour, and that’s limited mostly by their ingest speeds (≈300Mbps) and not my end, so that’s plenty.

With all that said, the option for consumers is great, I’m thankful I have that choice, wish more people had it too.