I use a lot of free and open source software, and some of the stuff I use a lot I support with donations. Python, Mozilla, FairEmail are examples of software I have donated to. Wikipedia also.

Proton and Tutanota are the most privacy-focused ones, offering zero-access encryption. The flipside is that they are a bit more expensive and less easy to use with third party email clients.

There are a number of alternatives like mailbox.org, Posteo and Fastmail which are cheaper, and less private than the above two but arguably still better for privacy than Gmail (in that their whole business model isn’t built off capturing and monetising your data).

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no complaints. I use it with third party clients like Thunderbird for desktop and FairEmail for Android so can’t speak to how good their web UI is.

I also strongly recommend getting your own domain name to use with your email. It means if you ever want to switch providers in future you won’t need to change your email address.

I feel like half of London could be listed here. Everyone knows about the American candy shops around Oxford St. I live in South London and every other shop is a vape shop or mobile phone accessory/repair shop. Not saying they are all fronts but they feel like it.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next “rank”. Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you’d have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

A lot of country- or city-specific subreddits either aren’t on here or are quite inactive. To be honest they were mostly cesspits on Reddit so maybe it’s no bad thing but you occasionally found useful information there.

Other than that, there were a few subreddits that were good for recipe ideas, like /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. /r/ZeroWaste was good too, on occasion.

In general, non-tech related communities don’t seem to have migrated over as much. Most of the subreddits I followed were related to technology in some way and now have pretty active communities on Lemmy.

I like my Garmin Vívoactive 3. It has all the basic features (for casual walking/running) and looks okay.

I really like the look of the “hybrid” watches like the Garmin Vívomove or Withings watches. They look great but as far as I know none of them have in-built GPS.

Would be very interested in checking out the BangleJS 2 as well.

Lawyer here, but a lot of my interests are tech-adjacent.

The United States abandoned the gold standard. I am guessing the point of this website is to suggest that was a bad thing. There is a lot of debate around the gold standard and most “mainstream” economists have no love for it, so I’m not saying the website is right or wrong, just that that’s what it’s about.

This looks promising, thanks!

Yes you’re right, what I’m thinking of is basically a magic mirror without the mirror. Thanks for the link, I will check that out!

Vaultwarden is not compiled from Bitwarden’s code, it’s a separate project and codebase but designed to be compatible with Bitwarden’s API.

Bitwarden is open source and you can self-host it but IIRC it’s a bit more complex and resource-hungry than Vaultwarden.