And it’ll stay that way until people use, and keep using, this space. So, to use an overused phrase, be the change you want to see :)

How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch has the recipe for that.

(Seriously, it’s a great read - one of my favourite popular science reads since, well, since Sagan.)

Growth is a secondary concern to me. I’m not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.

Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.

I’m enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don’t have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can’t opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.

Come on its obvious! Sedan - see Dan. Staring at a man called Dan.

Also ‘red’ has 3 letters, just like ‘gay’.

Not sure that its a must have and possibly uBO could handle it if I could be bothered to check but I like LocalCDN too.

Only Brits or BBC International viewers will know this character but Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.

And obviously Ellen Ripley, Dana Scully and Sarah Connor.

I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

A is definitely the lesser of two weevils.

Dear Earth, apart from the many terrible things we have done historically, we, the British, are most recently sorry for David Icke, Andrew Wakefield and now Graham Hancock. We have tried to balance this out but one David Attenborough only goes so far.

One of his kids is a Netflix exec apparently.

Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.

I’ve had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.

Incontinentia Buttocks.

Invitation To Love the soap opera that a lot of residents of Twin Peaks, especially Nadine, seemingly adored.

Bad idea. Last time someone did this we ended up with this timeline.

Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.