In the last three years the closest I came to a viable third place was VRChat, it was the best social experience I’ve ever had. I don’t think I need to say much more about that, it speaks for itself.

Gemini could have a really cool niche as a protocol which supports a lot of weird and wonderful systems, allowing them to be more useful and fostering a community interested in that stuff, but the TLS requirement completely prevents that.

I'd love to write a Gemini client for System 6 for example, but that just isn't feasible.

I guess my problem is partly that Gemini isn't useful to me, but even more broadly I don't understand who it's really useful for at all.

I guess ultimately it doesn’t matter, Gopher has more content, more services, and more users.

I wasn’t aware of this, but I’m glad I am now. If that’s the case it’s time to look elsewhere or self host, VC funds and acquisitions are rarely good for users so I’ll assume the worst.

My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine.

It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

The acceleration always feels wrong and UI elements have gotten smaller or nearly vanished. Trying to position a trackpoint to resize a window is maddening these days.

Back on the old Toshiba Satellites in the Win 9x days though? They felt just right, a solution that truly fit the computer and UI of the era.

That all said I still prefer them over virtually every touchpad.

I just have a voip phone adapter connected to a random old phone and I use voip.ms for the actual service. It costs effectively nothing to run. It’s not a landline in the transitional sense, but those largely don’t exist anymore.

I guess that’s the benefit of only having to target a very small amount of hardware, it saves time for improving other things.

I remember preferring Linux on PPC to Linux on intel laptops years ago. Apple PPC laptops tended to “just work” with Linux in my experience.

They’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, and people want to pretend they don’t exist because there’s a one in a million exception.

In the real world a man who can’t provide is going to find out almost no woman will tolerate that, even if they claim otherwise.

There are irredeemable places, and places that just don’t work for an individual. They key is knowing when it’s a problem instead of just running somewhere random and hoping it’ll fix all your issues.

Personally? I feel way better in sunny, dry climates. My mood improves a ton and I legitimately feel healthier. Right now I live in the exact opposite and I don’t like it.