With Google search results increasingly swamped with SEO-laden drivel, I've found the gap between Google and alternatives like Qwant and DDG has shrunk a lot recently. The little guys have improved a bit, but Google has also got worse.

It's not entirely untrue. Electric vehicles tend to be heavier than petrol or diesel vehicles, and heavier vehicles cause more wear to road surfaces than lighter ones.

That isn't to say electric vehicles are bad idea because of that though.

Yes, if there is one lesson we should have learned from Reddit it's that internet points aren't great for fostering real discussion and debate.

Still, with so many new link aggregation platforms appearing to fill the Reddit void, hopefully we still end up with something better.

Successfully monetising a platform means doing it in harmony with the the user base though, at least to some degree. A platform can't make money from users if it scares them all away. Social media platforms are especially vulnerable too because they rely on users to create their content. Nobody comes to Twitter to marvel at the system infrastructure, they come to read tweets.

The way certain tech companies are behaving currently is too knee-jerk and heavy handed. They are panicking and damaging their platforms in the process.

Federation is arguably the whole point of the fediverse however. Decentralisation is the solution to the problems created by centralised, proprietary platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but it can only survive if users are invested in it. If everyone joined one main instance, its admins could easily remove federation, add proprietary extensions etc and become yet another walled garden.

Trying to build the fediverse without onboarding users about federation would be like trying to build a democracy without educating citizens on the function and value of voting.

We should not shy away from sharing the concepts of federation, we just need to be better at sharing them.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that's worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

Some older people in the UK still prefer Fahrenheit, Celsius is still the official/default unit however.

A politician here recently tried to promote returning the UK to Imperial units, it has gone nowhere so far.

I've had this happen with a few times while looking for communities. Does kbin not fully federate with Lemmy yet, or is there a delay in the federation syncing up?

The most recent time this happened was with the retrocomputers@lemmy.world community. Search magazines for "retro computers" did not show it. Going directly to kbin.social/m/retrocomputers@lemmy.world URL returned a 404. I then searched for retrocomputers@lemmy.world and the community appears in kbin at the same URL, and I can subscribe but no posts/threads are visible.

What's happening here - does someone have to manually search for a Lemmy community address before it will start appearing in kbin?

I think the same happened a few days ago with gameboy@lemmy.world but now that does seem to work normally.

I've also seen a few kbin magazines not appear in Lemmy either.

Computers and tech in general often feels like magic. The first computer I ever used was a ZX Spectrum, now I have something vastly more computationally powerful, and constantly connected to a worldwide communication network and knowledge repository in my pocket!

It's amazing any of it actually works, especially as we don't always seem to know how it works.

I'm not sure I would accept Reddit paying me to go back, let alone me paying to use Reddit. The API debacle has laid bare the problem with centralised, proprietary social media - the users who create the value of the platform ultimately have no control over the platform. If it wasn't APIs and third party apps it could by anything else.

Why invest time (and money) contributing to something that could be pulled out from our feet at any point, with no recourse?

If you go back to Reddit you will probably end up spending hours reading about the protests anyway. Even if you stopped using all social media, chances are you're going to end up reading and thinking about the latest Reddit drama anyway, because it's making a new headline on at least one of the tech news sites each day.

Lemmy, kbin and the wider fediverse have attracted a lot of my own attention recently, but that's because I find it interesting and genuinely exciting for a new community to form and develop. Because of that I don't think it's a bad use of my time, so long as I still keep life generally in balance. Perhaps you should ask yourself the same question.

I played it on an original Game Boy and remember it being hard to see what was going on. Like you say it looks a bit easier with a Game Boy Colour palette.

A lot of Game Boy games struggled with the balance between sprite detail and legibility.