I used to volunteer in Oxfam Books and it’s honestly one of the best things you can do unless you do know people who want the books obviously.

Everything is inspected and if for whatever it’s not fit to be resold (big coffee stains, or missing pages etc) it’s recycled. And then any profits go to help people in need. And we came across some genuinely rare things a few times. An edition of Shakespeare which was worth £400 or so from the 1700s was probably the most impressive - this like that get sold online.

Obviously if there’s a different charity which means something more to you even better - I honestly think it’s the best thing to do with old books these days

Who is this Occam and how much will be charge me per year to use his razor?

This got a proper laugh out of me and that rarely happens, well done!

that Elon is a business genius

Spez is on record as being one of those people. The only person in tech who looks at Twitter and thinks “yeah, that’s what we need to be aiming for!”

I’ve had a Kindle for years - to be fair to Amazon kindles seem to be built to last - and used to do the same.

But last time I did I got an email saying they’re abandoning the mobi format and from now on when emailing documents to your Amazon library send it in epub format. Which is excellent news

I don’t see that much difference between Lemmy and Kbin. It is true that if you are on Mastodon your boosts on Kbin will show on Mastodon (for instance)

But I’ve created a separate account to keep them apart. I don’t have Twitter but I wouldn’t have wanted my Reddit likes showing up on Twitter

Seems like if you were that desperate for Reddit information it would be easier just to bite the bullet and go to Reddit. Seems like a while lot of effort for no reason

I don’t see how it would ‘fuck Reddit’. Do you mean it would draw more people to using Lemmy/Kbin? Or have I misunderstood? Because that’s definitely not going to happen.

And if you want to see that stuff just go back to using Reddit.

Admittedly I’ve blocked the meme communities in my feed - but that’s not what I wanted from Reddit or I want from here.

I think it’s more of a mass giving up on Reddit. Some people might come here, some people might go elsewhere, some people might use it to digital detox.

But the ‘mass’ bit will probably be ex mods, power users and people who cared about the way Reddit was being run - a sizeable number but definitely not a majority of users. But crucially a lot of the people who helped to provide quality content.

Despite the hate he gets, Spez is not quite as batshit crazy as Musk (he still is coming up with shit ideas for the future of Reddit though). So although I think Reddit will become a much less interesting place it probably won’t become an unuseable dumpster fire for casual users (like Twitter).

I started using it with SwiftKey and when that went shit started using it with Gboard so probably 10 years…? If I have to do it cave man style it feels impossibly slow. My wife still types each individual letter out quite happily.

It’s ironic because I used to have a BlackBerry back in the day and thought I wouldn’t be able to cope without a physical keyboard

It depends, but I find it’s at it’s worst when the kiss is the ‘reward’ for the hero/heroine for being so heroic. Or just generally when it’s used as a lazy piece of short hand storytelling to show ‘yeah these guys love each other or something, whatever’.

On the other hand it can be genuinely cathartic or romantic.

I’m a Kbin convert I must say - it’s as versatile as you like and considering it’s very much under construction it’s really impressive how much you can do with it.

I lurked on several different fediverse options before though and none of them were bad but Kbin just clicked for me

Well, they’re supposed to help you quit smoking cigarettes so you’re not inhaling all the tar and other stuff that usually lead to lung cancer. They’re not primarily designed to get rid of your nicotine addiction. So it depends on your definition.

It’s undoubtedly healthier to do neither

I switched to vaping because I’d just met my now wife and she hated the smell of smoke and all the associated stuff that goes with it, partly because she’d just come out of a bad relationship with a chain smoker but also because it’s just not nice for non smokers anyway.

That was about 10 years ago and I still vape. I’m will aware that I’ve just swapped one addiction for another but I don’t consider myself a smoker - haven’t touched a cigarette since, and genuinely never wanted to for a very long time now. My lungs still feel a lot better, I can run and do excercise without feeling like my lungs are imploding.

A lot of the studies done on vaping it should be noted use old fashioned kit and unrealistic use case scenarios (such testing until a coil gives out - a coil would usually last someone at least a week) -but even taking that into account I’ll take my chances with vaping. I tried all the other methods of giving up smoking and none of them worked for me so this is the closest.

As I side note, I am against disposable vapes and think the law should crack down on sales to underage people. A solution would be to only sell in established vape shops and require ID with every sale. I’m not naturally hard-line about this sort of thing but the school vaping thing is well out of control and is need of sorting out

It’s that kind of thing that made me take the plunge with Kbin - it’s a lot easier to filter out things you’re not interested in.

There are genuine people on the extreme Left who are Stalin apologists, and they are called Tankies. They are a fringe but they’re not trolls, they believe it

Yep in the UK everyone from teens to your Nan use WhatsApp whatever smartphone they’ve got.

My Dad is the only outlier who sends texts, I think he does it on purpose to be ‘different’ though. Everyone misses his messages until he sends them again on WhatsApp.

I have an account on both. But I timed myself for about 5 minutes on both Kbin and Lemmy (yes I am that kind of person) to see which I found more intuitive, fun etc and just felt like Kbin worked better for me. Just feels more natural somehow

But it’s also good that there’s different options for different people and everyone’s not just having to use one centralised website like the one most of us have just come from…

I have also signed up to Squabbles which is another centralised service, kind of a cross between Twitter and Reddit. It’s so-so, but a lot more interesting than tildes

I like Long Tall Sally - it’s fast and wild!

Precisely, the importance is if the mods stick around or not.

One sub I was in the Mod basically said a few weeks ago ‘I’ve had it with this, no offense guys but just run it how you want from now on’I’m retiring’. The users didn’t turn it into a protest sub but somehow it’s worse than that because it’s repetitive and boring.

So there’s a few old hands sticking around but I doubt there’ll be new people joining it. And I think that will be true for a lot of unmoderated subs, they won’t all get full of porn and spam, they’ll just become much less interesting