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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: April 15th, 2020

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  • I keep extinct in the wild and critically endangered species of fish in my aquariums and am a member of a couple of fish focused associations who work with universities for the goal of preservation of species. been considering getting into red listed frogs and cactus, but the communities are smaller (so less access to species) and space is a premium when living in an apartment.

    i wish there was more exposure of this hobby because it’s such an affordable, easy and “low effort” thing to do, but a lot of people who care about the environment and animals basically get offended when you keep animals “locked up” in an aquarium. in my opinion, serious aquarists (not the pet store furniture mentality) are invaluable, as a lot of species has been saved from extinction through aquarist efforts and university collaboration to reintroduce them to their native ranges after restoration work is completed (at least Lenoardo DiCaprio made a little bit of social media impact for one of the associations in 2022).

    I should add, overfishing is not the leading cause for extinction in freshwater fish, it’s pollution from agriculture, as the vast majority of fish threatened with extinction have no utility to us (or bright enough colors to benefit the commercial pet trade - brightly colored species are generally not even found in the wild, and have their colors from decades of selective breeding by dedicated aquarists).




  • I’ve said this a million times, but it’s definitely about time we stop spending taxes on a rogue entity across the ocean who definitely does not have our best interests in mind. I’m not convinced it’s even legal and I don’t understand why the legal prospects have never been brought up about this fucking situation. R&D money should not go to a foreign corporation. In addition, I (and pretty much everyone else on the planet) already paid for microsofts products and services so my government can use it (against my will), so why the fuck do they get away with setting a public price at all? It should legally be free or the governments shouldn’t need to pay for it in the first place, and it should legally be open source because it’s publicly funded. There are just so many problems with the entire idea of our government using Windows, Office, and their services.





  • the biggest reason for subscriptions is. 1. consumer laws don’t protect it. and 2. you can quit your job and don’t have to be actually productive and work for a living because your users will just keep on “buying” the product every month indefinitely. and finally 3. subscription basically gives you monopoly in any given area you host it; because the user will usually not look or even have the means to look for options or alternatives once they have already tied a percentage of their monthly income to a company for the software or service they provide - as wallets got spread thinner and thinner until they, now, are entirely swallowed by subscriptions.

    the only people arguing in favor of subscriptions are those who don’t want to work for a living while still taking advantage of the capitalist system.










  • facebook, google talk, etc. all relied on the XMPP protocol. you could add your facebook messenger friends to google talk or any of the open source clients like pidgin. it was the holy era of instant messaging. federated. solution. no bullshit lockdown to a specific system like in the days of ICQ, Skype, etc.

    then both facebook and google talk locked down their XMPP server and i lost 80% of my friendlist on XMPP. and that was that. i had to get facebook. i had to get google mail. especially relevant when microsoft bought skype and it turned to shit.

    guess what. today we’re split on even more clients than we used to be. need signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, telegram, discord, band, matrix, threema, session, irc, slack, and steam chat installed on my fucking device. and all because meta and google pulled the rug to isolate their systems and force user conversion.

    no, thanks. open source federation is the only solution to unshitification and that’s never going to happen as long as people do shit like leaving x for bluesky instead of mastodon etc. leaving facebook for band instead of literally any other fediverse platform (because facebook has devolved to ads and facebook groups - everything else is irrelevant or dead on there). etc etc.




  • DeltaChat. I don’t use it myself because it’s built on electron (which basically excludes 99% of modern chat clients); but as it’s technically an email client turned into a chat client, we can assume you’re protected by PGP when writing to most users, and with the added effect of not needing to convince anyone to install anything since from their end it’s just an email.