deleted by creator

A lot of them are actually just re-purposed leather or pleather from jackets I find at swap meets and thrift stores. I also occasionally get scrap leather from my dads friend who owns a ranch

Anki is what I use; it’s solid, simple, and tracker-free. It’s also on FDroid

I bind my own books using fiberboard and leather, and wood glue has always worked for me. My oldest book is around 9 years old and it is still going strong

Most of the arguments I have seen against it are ethos based, which imo is valid considering privacy involves a lot of trust in the company itself. Brave has had a bad track record with doing shady things (def the crypto part) but also things like blocking ads and replacing it with their own, and leaking TOR DNS records among other shady practices/mistakes. Plus on top of that it is based on chromium (maintained by Google) which for some might be a pro or a con.

More examples off the top of my head:
Express VPN : Mullvad VPN
Brave Browser : Librewolf
Firefox Mobile : Iceraven
IOS : GrapheneOS
“Hardened” Windows : Qubes OS
Steam : GOG
Telegram : Matrix
WhatsApp : SimpleX
RCS : XMPP
Bitcoin : Monero

Same here, been using Xbox series controllers on Linux for about 2 years, no problem. Never bothered to update the firmware.

Same, 80% of my gaming was on older releases. The only game I played released in 2025 was an indie TD game called Dungeon Warfare III, mostly because I played and loved I and II.

For real. The 3rd party purge in 23 is what got me to explore Lemmy, and I’m still here today. Reddit UI is unusable

007 games are great hidden gems. Everyone knows Goldeneye, but Nightfire, Everything or Nothing, and From Russia with Love are all amazing spy shooters. Hopefully this one gets the same magic

Of course! If you cut it very thin it’s crunchy but not hard to chew through. A julienne cut (1/8in or 3mm) with a knife gets it to look pretty but shredding would work too taste-wise

I usually do avocado, carrot, and cucumber with a sprinkling of sesame seed. The avocado is soft while the others are crunchy and they offer a nice texture dinamic when balanced. They also have a nice fresh taste that compliments the sharpness of wasabi and the savory/salt of soy sauce

Vegetarian sushi comes to mind. Sometimes I even prefer it to sushi with fish when I’m in the mood; it’s crisp and refreshing when done right. If you use good quality nori and rice vinegar you’ll get that oceanic flavor you’re looking for without any fish.

100% agree. Politics is very much a label and judge arena. It’s sad that the American Right has claimed the libertarian label and the gadsden flag, seeing that their authoritarian ideology couldn’t be further away from the real meanings of either actual libertarian philosophy or the flag itself.

Real libertarianism in my opinion is closer to the writings of John Locke than it is to the current American Right. It’s sad that it’s been twisted to be seen in that way, and consequently hated that way too.

Tumblr works well provided you are in to that kind of posting/fandom. They haven’t enshittified their web ui, so you can access the website without the use of their app. You can easily sign up with an email alias and use a VPN for location/IP.

Firefox and its forks like Fennec and Iceraven let you install a website as an “app” and the feel is essentially the same (on android, not sure about ios). Slap on Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Noscript and isolate in a sandbox or work profile and you have a pretty good setup, despite using a mainstream service.

There’s also the fediverse ofc. Pixelfed offers an experience like Instagram, and Loops is similar to TikTok/Shorts but with smaller communities and creators.

I mainly get them from YouTube and their resppective websites. My favorites are:

Babish Culinary Universe (Everything)
Pailin’s Kitchen (Thai)
Sheldo’s Kitchen (Sotheast Asian)
Brian Lagerstrom (Baking and American)
Curries with Bumbi (Indian)
Hanbit Cho (Baking)

Second for Half Baked Harvest. I love how cozy the site looks and the recipes are great

My first instinct was to say no, but as I thought about it more it became more of a gray area. Comics use art and illustration to convey scene, and the only “reading” per se is dialogue and sometimes narration. Most novels lean more on description and imagination. But certain books/plays like Hamlet or The Iliad are also mostly dialogue/narration yet we consider those to be “reading”, essentially just without the art.

I’ve been a Steam only buyer for a long time. There are so many cool features and extra stuff, most games work out of the box, and they’ve been putting in a lot of effort on the linux scene with proton and the deck. But even despite all that, I’m starting to move to GOG. The sad truth is that you don’t own any of your games on Steam. I’ve been having more and more games be removed from my library, and games that either just don’t work or are “updated” into something worse. Not Steam’s fault really, but GOG is much more consumer friendly and I actually get files I can use and keep forever, no required updates or DRM. I really like Steam, and am having a hard time leaving it, but GOG is just the better choice from a long term and consumer ethics perspective.

XMPP/Jabber comes to mind. You can self host or pay for hosting on a service like Snikket. The protocol supports OMEMO encryption and you can use whatever client you want (Cheogram, Dino, Gajim, etc) on any platform like android or linux. Cheogram is even coming out with a web interface for it, and it supports calling and video calling.

Threat model wise, whatever server you pick would have to be targeted directly, and would therefore be immune to sweeping regulation that directly targets big hitters like Signal. And if you pay for servers outside the EU, even more so