This. After my first Android phone I had only gotten Nexus phones. I had a Nexus 6p when the Pixel was announced, and it wasn’t going to have a headphone jack. I tried multiple dongles with my Nexus 6p, and none of them both reliably worked with my headphones and fast charged my phone. My wife ordered a Pixel, I ordered a Note 9.

I’ve gone Note 9, then a One Plus Nord v10, and now an Asus ZenFone 9. Every time a manufacturer ditched the headphone jack (or made it only available at ludicrous price), I just switched manufacturers. I don’t even use a headphone jack that often, but when I need it I want it to be there and just work.

When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.

I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.

My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

For note, this is an option on Kbin. You can go to /d/thedomain.com and block the whole domain

I use kbin.social mostly because I liked the interface better and I wanted to be contrary, and if I ever self-host it, I’m much more familiar with PHP than Rust.

For sure, they’ll make some spec that isn’t very compatible with lots of cables, chargers, devices, etc. But, it will charge. A normal usb c cable might not Super Ultra Mega Charge your iPhone like an apple cable and adapter would, but it will charge, and vice-versa. That’s basically what we have with usb-c standards currently, though.

Don’t think of Mastodon like 1000 separate social media sites. Think of Mastodon, think of the Fediverse, like email. Lots of email goes through gmail, and maybe gmail works better with gmail. But email is more than gmail. But despite AOL’s best efforts, despite google’s best efforts, email is also yahoo, and outlook, and Proton, and MailChimp, and your college email address, and whatever mail server your company spun up, and if you feel like it whatever mail server you setup in your basement. And yes, email has had more complications over the years as google tries to strangle it. But it’s the real open platform, and the Fediverse can join it.

API access has an approval process, and reddit has already been clear they will not just allow users to get their own API keys.