Guess I’ll be not watching my second World Cup in the space of 12 years. Fuck off FIFA.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, indeed.

And who gets to decide what’s evil and what’s not?

Of course he should be prosecuted.

Regardless of what the victim has done or was doing you can’t have a society where it’s regarded as ok to intentionally walk up to someone on the street and murder them. That way lies anarchy and madness.

Good news, although I’ve been holding off on updating to 15 as, last I heard, it was causing issues with Pixel 6 Pros. Not sure if that’s been solved yet, need to go have a look.

Well possibly - I do follow people Mastadon though, and it still feels quiet to me. I probably need to spend more time finding people to follow.

Hah, neither it is, my bad! I just assumed and didn’t bother to check. Will fix that.

Having used both, here my view on why BlueSky is outstripping Mastadon:

• It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
• There’s no messing around with instances to negotiate - you go to bsky.app BlueSky.com and it just works. Hard to overstate how important that is in retaining people who take a look at a new platform.
• There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
• There are a lot of relatively influential people on it, media people, authors and actors and comedians, who have largely shifted as a single mass (probably due to the three above reasons) - so for non-famous people there’s a sense of being in touch with what’s happening.
• It’s riding a wave of positivity about itself, which Mastadon never had - this touches on your point about media coverage of it, but whether that’s really due to money being paid to news orgs or just due to journalists seeing what they are doing as being important for others to know about is open to question.

I think the various high profile organisational defections to BS have been a big part of it too. I only looked at BS for the first time when I saw the story about the Guardian newspaper quitting Twitter.

I took a look, created an account and was posting and following people within seconds, it was just really, really smooth. Again, that was not the case (for me) with Mastadon, where it took a while to figure some of it out, and it all just felt a bit fiddly and complicated.

Much like Lemmy in fact, after leaving Reddit - but again there was enough of a swell of new people shifting as a mass that it felt like it was worth the hassle.

Ha, fair enough - if it works for you, then ok :-)

Dav Macgyver’s Photo Editor is pretty solid for that sort of thing. Not FOSS as far as I know, but very good. Used it for about 10 years now.

Or maybe it won’t happen at all.

I’ve been using it a couple of weeks and loving it. It’s just the way Twitter used to be - fun, quality content, from the people you choose to follow.

No algorithm trying to feed you recommendations. No paid-for blue ticks. No hate-filled bile being ignored or endorsed by those in charge. If someone’s trolling you block/report them and they’re gone, just like that.

At the moment it’s more or less everything Twitter should be. It may or may not last, but for the moment it’s great.

May also have been a subtle way to help protect in case the castle was stormed. I’ve certainly heard of castles where the steps were sometimes irregular heights - those who lived there would be used to it, but invaders would not and would find it harder to move effectively. A differently spiralling stair might have the same effect.

Paul Hardcastle senses an opportunity…

Remember when Google Photos was basically perfect? And then they started messing around with it? I 'member :-(

I’m in the same boat as OP, and while I think you’re probably right, I do also think that were I in better shape with fewer responsibilities now, I’d still prefer the experience of being at a gig/club night without phones.

Only a personal preference of course, not saying people are wrong if they prefer how things are now.

Fair enough. Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good art - just like the blue rectangle, it depends what the artistic intent was, and how well it was carried out.

By that logic though, as long as the person who made the blue 6x4 had an idea in their head, it would count as art, no?

True

Possibly sometimes they’re carrying it just in case they find something worth bringing along.