tal

I don't know about number one, but a few that I miss.

• freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.

• newegg.com

computer components retailer

is still around, but it doesn't hold the spot it once did.

• bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.

• A few "hosting" sites that went down with a lot of user-created content. No one thing was amazing, maybe, but it produced a lot of dangling links. Geocities: "At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated.[7] The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.[8]". AngelFire. Tripod. Apparently the latter two are still around in some limited form.

• Kaleidoscope.net, a site featuring themes for the eponymous classic MacOS themeing software package. They did a good job of generating theme previews. Fun to browse through.

There are a few people running telnet-connected BBSes on the Internet.

kagis

Ah, someone has a list.

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 27 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 976 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.

If you aren't specifically thinking of something that you remember and just want some sort of story that has all these elements, I think that you might want to look into LLM generation of stories.

It might be that it's taking into account how recently you used the thing or something.

As long as any infrastructure used to hint to the indexing engine that its index is dirty to avoid fully-rescanning the filesystem occasionally is available to non-Apple software, I assume that you could just use a different software package for this.

kagis

I haven't used any of these, and can't recommend them, but it looks like Mac developers have built alternatives:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spotlight-alternatives-mac-search/

I mostly use plocate on my Linux machine if I want to do a search across filenames on the filesystem as a whole.

Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.

I'm not saying that there's no magical thinking with cars

"my magical fuel additive" or whatever

but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.

It's also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.

I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you'd think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.

You might want to list the platform you want to use it on. I'm assuming that you're wanting to access this on a smartphone of some sort?

Totally spoils those nice scrolling ANSI banners that BBSes used where it wss intended that the line speed would regulate the unveiling of the art. :-)

This will increase your privacy by protecting you from ISP web traffic analysis. It does this by generating fake DNS and HTTP request.

If you're the kind of attacker in a position to be doing traffic analysis in the first place, I suspect that there are a number of ways to filter this sort of thing out. And it's fundamentally only generating a small amount of noise. I suspect that most people who would be worried about traffic analysis are less worried about someone monitoring their traffic knowing that it's really 20% of their traffic going to particular-domain.com instead of just 2% of their traffic, and more that they don't know it to be known that they're talking to particular-domain.com at all.

For DNS, I think that most users are likely better-off either using a VPN to a VPN provider that they're comfortable with, DNS-over-HTTP, or DNSSEC.

HTTPS itself will protect a lot of information, though not the IP address being connected to (which is a significant amount of information, especially with the move to IPv6), analysis of the encrypted data being requested (which I'm sure could be fingerprinted to some degree for specific sites to get some limited idea of what a user is doing even inside an encrypted tunnel). A VPN is probably the best bet to deal with an ISP that might be monitoring traffic.

There are also apparently some attempts at addressing the fact that TLS's SNI exposes domain names in clear text to someone monitoring a connection

so someone may not know exactly what you're sending, but knowing the domain you're connecting to may itself be an issue.

In a quick test, whatever attempts to mitigate this have actually been deployed, SNI still seems to expose the domain in plaintext for the random sites that I tried.

$ sudo tcpdump -w packets.pcap port https  

<browses to a few test websites in Chromium, since I'm typing this in Firefox, then kills off tcpdump process>

$ tshark -r packets.pcap -2 -R ssl.handshake.extensions_server_name  

I see microsoft.com, google.com, olio.cafe (my current home instance), and cloudflare.net have plaintext SNI entries show up. My guess is that if they aren't deploying something to avoid exposure of their domain name, most sites probably aren't either.

In general, if you're worried about your ISP snooping on your traffic, my suggestion is that the easiest fix is probably to choose a VPN provider that you do trust and pass your traffic through that VPN. The VPN provider will know who you're talking to, but you aren't constrained by geography in VPN provider choice, unlike ISP choice. If you aren't willing to spend anything on this, maybe something like Tor, I2P, or, if you can avoid the regular Web entirely for whatever your use case is, even Hyphanet.

and it would stay on for a bit as the capacitors drained?

Yeah, I've had that too, but I don't think that that's likely what's going on there, if they fully shut the thing down, flipped the PSU switch off, and then started filming the card being inserted. LIke, it was maybe a couple of seconds at most. And honestly, I'd probably still want to avoid plugging stuff into a board while that is on, since I don't know what other stuff also might be powered up on the motherboard. :-/

Well, I think that the fundamental problem is that most people here are here because they do want to use the Threadiverse as an alternative to Reddit and find it to be the best alternative.

Of the alternatives that I know of (and don't personally think are as desirable), on checking, all seem to have a Web-based front-end. You might have a PWA, what amounts to an "app" that's basically the web browser running on mobile and appearing to be a separate app.

There are some vaguely-similar systems, but they tend to not be a "collection of forums" systems, things like Twitter, Bluesky, and so forth.

I guess you could try using Usenet, though last I checked

and that was some time back

there wasn't a lot of discussion happening any more on Usenet. A lot of the people still using it are using it to basically get commercial access to "binaries" newsgroups, to pirate stuff. A big part of the reason that the Usenet discussion crowd mostly moved to Reddit-like sites was because they dealt with spam better. You can get free (registration required) Usenet access from eternal-september.org and commercial Usenet service from someone like supernews.com. I don't know what the state of things there is. I'm sure that someone out there has a Usenet client for Android.

kagis

It looks like the pickings are pretty slim, but they're out there. Here's someone's list from 2023:

https://xdaforums.com/t/a-list-of-android-usenet-newsreaders-how-to-search-reference-nntp-dejanews-google-web-archives-for-comp-mobile-android-newsgroup-topics-in-one-tap.4634973/

Note that there are some limitations compared to something like Reddit or the Threadiverse. You can't edit a Usenet post once sent and normally can't delete them either (there is something called cancel messages, but I have never used them and IIRC some servers won't honor them anyway). Unless things have changed since last I looked, there was no standard support for something like Markdown across clients.

If you're willing to use Usenet with a native client on a desktop machine, rather than Android, your choices become rather better. And there are clients with very good "offline" support

you can basically download a lot of content and make posts, and have them only be sent next time you have an Internet connection, which the Threadiverse and Reddit don't really have support for. That doesn't matter as much for most people today, where omnipresent Internet access is far more common than it was when people were using Usenet for discussion quite a bit, but it's possible that it could be a benefit for you. You don't benefit from a lot of the filtering and moderation that other users do, but clients do tend to have powerful tools for you to locally filter out content that you don't want to see.

There are things like Matrix, IRC, and Discord, but they aren't really a direct analog to what Reddit and the Threadiverse are

they're really aimed at more real-time, interactive chats. I don't find that I like discussion with them nearly as much, because people tend to write shorter material with less thought put into them. But they do serve certain niches, and you might like them.

Mulvad apparently uses Wireguard. Is there an Android Wireguard client that supports multiple VPNs and toggling each independently?

“If countries see that central bank money can disappear if European politicians see fit, they might decide to withdraw their reserves from the eurozone,” he added.

I mean, the assets were frozen. I imagine that if someone is planning to invade Ukraine a second time around, the freezing alone is probably sufficient to make them not want to store assets there while doing so.