Ooooh, I see - that makes perfect sense. Thanks :)

Short stories is the answer. They do seem to mainly the province of horror and sci-fi but even if that’s not a favoured genre(s) it’s a way back in. Try Night Shift or Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (give The Mist a miss though, it’s not really a ‘short’ short story). Take it a page at a time, stop reading the minute you start to lose interest, try again 15mins later. Remember it’s fun activity not a competitive sport, take all the time you need, the books you want to read are going nowhere :)

F. is no longer true. They recently removed support for this after lots of people abused the feature.

A VPN service isn’t for illegal stuff. It can be used that way but for me its usefulness is in providing a layer of privacy between me, my ISP and online services I use.

After installing the wallet from getmonero, I went to localmonero.co and located a reputable seller in my country who accepted Amazon gift cards bought with cash.

I then bought an Amazon gift card using cash and kept the reciepts.

I then, as per requirements of the seller, took photos of the gift card number and the receipts to demonstrate the date and the fact I’d paid with cash. After sending these images to my PC I edited them in gimp to remove store identifying info from the receipts image, ran both images through a metadata removal tool and initiated the trade with the seller with the images. They accepted the trade and approx 20mins later the XMR was in my wallet

I have Ampache running on a self hosted server, which has desktop and mobile apps.

Oh wow, I’d forgotten all about geek code.

‘Better’ is relative. To me its better because no one person or group owns or controls the software. There’s no central authority. Don’t like the instance you’re on? Just move to another. Cant find an instance you like? Host your own. Don’t like the path the developers are taking? Fork the code. As long as the very core remains standard (ActivityPub), all possibilities are on.

There needs to be a return to being patient. Most fedi software is not beyond beta yet. They will develop and they will mature but right now the fediverse is a toddler learning to walk. There are issues but with time they’ll get addressed. We’ve all got so addicted to shiny cool apps and services we’ve become prepared to sacrifice our privacy, our choices and our reason at the altar of a quick dopamine hit.

There’s no big money to throw at these issues and therefore no dedicated team. This means solutions come slower. But they will come and they will be motivated by usefulness not profit. The people developing these things have lives and day jobs. Give them time.

They’ve not taken the sub private but they have now put up a post supporting the protest and turning off all posting and commented. A bit half hearted maybe but better than nothing.

They have recently removed support for port forwarding. That won’t stop a user being able to torrent but it will stop seeding and will affect discoverability and speed somewhat.

Has no negative impact on their privacy features