One of many deeply frustrating things about Trump’s fire hose of terrible and frequently actively evil ideas is that not only do they come in such volumes that it’s overwhelming, but it’s also incredibly hard to tell if something is a brief fixation he will quickly move on from or something that is going to be a recurring issue to deal with.

Which is to say: Christ, he’s back on this one again?

This is brilliant.

I’ve considered that a few times, and have done the 'phone chatting while gaming" solution, but it gets pretty unwieldy quickly in my experience, sadly.

I have the same question, but a particular problem I am having is the need to chat via text while streaming instead of audio for accessibility purposes. Discord’s game overlay worked okay for this (not great, but usable) on Windows, but doesn’t run at all on Linux, and every alternative I look at seems very voice chat focused. Steam does have chat options within the overlay but doesn’t seem to have good chat history options.

I fully believe that this happened, but holy hell is it unbelievably fucked up that, if I am reading this correctly, this man possessed photographic evidence of the sexual abuse of an underage girl (itself illegal to possess!) and managed to use them to blackmail the victim’s mother with the threat to reveal them. The threat of the victim being revealed as a victim was considered blackmail material, while Atkins was absolutely secure in the idea that he could just possess child sexual abuse material and wasn’t going to get busted for it.

Fuck this world.

Aw, that’s a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)

Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.

Got it on both IronFox and LibreWolf. Not perfect, but neither was Brave dark mode. Probably going to have to disable LibreWolf’s anti-fingerprinting feature just so I can tell sites to use dark mode, though.

I got the export step on my own, but I swear IronFox does not have the Manage Bookmarks option anywhere. Starting to think I’m just going to need to grab a Mozilla account, upload my bookmarks to LibreWolf on desktop, sync bookmarks, and pull them to IronFox that way.

I hope WaterFox pans out for you! Do you mind sharing the issues you had with LibreWolf?

Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.

Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):

1. Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
2. No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that! EDIT TWO: Not really good for Incognito mode though.
3. Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
4. Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.

LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!

Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.

I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.

Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.

I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.

I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?

I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act (and shout-out to California for doing so here), but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists and Amazon is in league with them.

Flags for Good has a lot of great flags available, if you want to peruse their collection. https://flagsforgood.com/

Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.

Why is “(most favored nation status)” in parentheses?

I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.

The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.

District heating systems have fascinated me since I learned about them and I wish I could find more information on things like the financial costs and work involved in converting existing neighborhoods to block heating, etc. I don’t like having single points of failure, but the idea of having some kind of central heating station for every square mile or something seems like a happy medium and I’m curious how the numbers actually play out.