• 5 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • A few little things rather than one or two big things - email advertised as private but they won’t let you use anonymous addresses (like anonaddy or duck.com) for recovery addresses, an ever growing portfolio of products that seem unfinished or incomplete or lacking in standard features like they’re trying to corner the whole privacy market rather than making one or two products but making them really good, poor customer service and support as a continual theme throughout their existence.

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting they’re doing anything dodgy, I just feel that I don’t really trust them. They just make really odd choices and it all feels like a haphazard rush.


  • You would think that someone at Proton would’ve had the foresight to realise the reputational damage this (along with the LLM announcement) would do to the company.

    Without wanting to sound smart after the fact, I’ve been suspicious about Proton for years. I briefly had an email account with them but I could never quite shake the feeling there is something off about the whole company. This move just confirms to me I was correct to be suspicious.


  • No, they’re not just assholes. If they were just that, nobody would give a shit. I understand what you think they’re doing and I understand why you think it’s a good thing. As I said to someone else, there’s literally no way for anyone to summarise everything. You can either watch it or not, I can’t make you.

    It’s an oddity of the whole situation that 90% of the ‘ordinary’ members of TST are good people who want good things, but the owners of TST (and they are the owners, TST is also a registered business as well as a tax-exempt religion) are really not and they have absolute control over it.



  • My take on that is that is that its entirely possible to disagree with and not support any number of bad groups. I definitely wouldn’t want my kids exposed to either group.

    The issues raised in this story are to do with education, but the issues with both groups are concerning and go beyond education. I’m not sure not opposing one of them because they’re not as established as the other or less awful than the other is really valid. Being less awful is not equal to not awful at all.



  • I’m a Satanist and affiliated with neither CoS or TST. The leadership of TST are not good people. One of them tried to make himself the god of a cargo cult and the other has a history of making racist, antisemitic and ablist statements. He also owned a website about eugenics until 2018.

    That video I linked to is long but it is very well sourced and I hope might give you a bit more insight into who you’re supporting if you choose to join or donate to them. There’s a lot of comments under the video from ex-TST members, including Ministers and Chapter Heads who’ve been badly burnt by TST.












  • I’m not suggesting hateful content wasn’t edited or removed, I’m saying when I went back there was a lot of it that had obviously just been posted. I’ve no doubt it’s mostly gone now if I went back and looked (which I really don’t want to do unless I absolutely have to) but my point is that it happens so much and so often that its often there for awhile if a mod or mod team is a bit slow off the mark. It’s indicative of the type of user on there.

    I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.

    I guess when I think about ‘old reddit’ I mean reddit as it was before there were even subs or when subs first launched. Reddit was created by Digg users who were annoyed with Digg’s direction. There was a lot of hope and effort put in to it being ‘better’ - not just technically but also in terms of ethos. I’m the first to admit I stupidly just ignored the influx of bad subs like the one you mention or jailbait etc. But it’s become impossible to ignore to the point where it feels like its a constant drip-drip of hate content that mods are barely on top of.

    And even without that outright race (or gender, or sex, or sexuality etc) based hate, reddit just feels to me like there’s a constant undercurrent of aggression and sneering. Maybe, like I said before, it’s always been there and I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.