There a lot to choose from! I haven’t read this translation myself but I know people who have and say its very good - the Richard Howard edition: https://www.tfobooks.com/book/9781567928273

LMDE - no idea if its the ‘best’ but its the best for me right now in that it does what I want, looks how I want and stays out of my way.

Self hosted Standard Notes?

I’m both cis and hetero. There is not one iota of evidence I’ve seen that there is any sort of movement that wishes death on cis and hetero people, or that organises vigilante groups to hunt down cis or hetero people to beat them up, or that invents bizarre rumours about ‘what they do’ or conflates cis and hetero people with paedophilia or that tries to organise campaigns to get cis or hetero-centric book removed from libraries.

There is no formal or informal system of oppression towards cis and hetero people. It just doesn’t exist.

There’s so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another’s experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you’re subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.

You’ll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there’s also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.

You’ll only think its full of hate if you’re not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.

And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn’t excuse it a as behaviour but I don’t think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.

The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn’t have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.

There’s a fine line between celebrating the history of your ancestors and performative cultural appropriation. Being interested in ones ancestors is one thing - swearing that you’re ‘fiery’ because of your Irish ancestry when you’re 3 or 4 generations removed from that ancestry is a bit weird at best.

I think the US does have a culture all its own - some of the world’s best authors, musicians, artists etc are from the US. It does puzzle me that some US folks are so desperate to claim deep cultural ties elsewhere when they have a pretty good culture already, formed in part from those ancestors.

• Twin Peaks
• The X-Files
• Dark
• Chernobyl
• Happy Valley
• Line of Duty
• Luther
• Spaced
• Wolf Hall
• True Detective S1, S4

Phone, no. Second hand Kobo + calibre, yes.

Much as I love physical books, I’ve now reached an age where having the ability to increase font size, adjust margins, kerning and leading is invaluable.

I am also a Satanist and they have no direct affect on me either. That doesn’t change the fact that what they do and how they use their power, including how they treat members and ex-members, is, in my opinion badly wrong.

From what I can see the claim they fight for religious pluralism is very ambiguous. They’ve certainly lost a lot of court cases but I’m not sure how that’s helped anyone.

That’s totally your call but for, its always been my opinion that the ends rarely justify the means. Especially these means.

I can;t vouch for the temple watch site itself as I don’t know who is behind it (and is seems dead on the live web) but it is heavily referenced and they seem like pretty good sources to me.

It literally is a cult of personality. The two of them own and control all aspects of it.

They own and control the organisation so its not really possible to separate them. Its up to you if you’re happy about supporting them - there are plenty of other orgs you could choose to support though. Some mentioned in the first of those links.

TST are not the ‘good guys’.

The two owners of TST are:

• Lucien Greaves - long, text piece.
• Malcolm Jarry - text piece.

Content warning: quotes contain discussions of racism, ablism, eugenics, fascism.

Or if you prefer video, DeadDomain has some of the same receipts

https://filen.io/

Not pricey, e2ee clients, open source, servers in Germany, 10gb free tier to try them out. Been using them for a few years now. The clients used to be a bit crap but they’re very good now.

TIL, thank you.

Sorry for the self promotion, but I’m part of a group of atheistic Satanists who operate a podcast about books and reading called The Devil’s Library - its literally 4 friends talking each month about a particular book we agreed to read - bit like a book club I guess. It does skew horror/fantasy/scifi heavy I guess.

They’re not what they seem.

Someone needs to check your harddrive mate. You’re way, way too invested in splitting this particular hair.

According to a two year old post Voyager can’t create Communities. You can get around this by visiting your instance (lemmy.world) and logging in via a web browser.