schnurrito

I no longer use IRC; when I did, I used KVIrc near the end, which seems to still be getting releases.

I looked at the two complaints you linked to and at how those threads seem to be displayed on these users' instances:

• https://sfba.social/@otters_raft@lemmy.ca/115267196743748430
• https://mas.to/@otters_raft@lemmy.ca/115283224174559468

(edit: I don't know why they aren't displaying as links, but changing them to have a link text doesn't help either, so I'm keeping them like this)

That looks the same as it has always looked, to the best of my knowledge. I've gotten at least one similar complaint before, from a Mastodon user who didn't understand what they were looking at when they got a Lemmy post in their timeline. So I think the answer to your question is no, nothing changed, either it is a coincidence that you got two such complaints within a few days, or what actually changed is that your posts have (for whatever reason) become more visible on Mastodon.

This is even funnier when read aloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7ksx6D3dlE

I'm not sure I understand your substantive question very well.

There already is a bridge from RSS feeds to ActivityPub: https://rss-parrot.net/ (there are plenty of sources I follow through that).

The clue of what ActivityPub is for is in the name: it is for publishing one's activities. For example "I've written a new blog post", "I've commented on someone else's activity", "I've upvoted someone else's comment".

RSS is really just a structured format to describe the content of a website in simpler terms. It doesn't ever send any information to anyone, it doesn't have any mechanism for anyone else to interact.

I used to follow news sites directly through an RSS reader. But I would need to set that up separately on each device, including after reinstalling, which I just can't be bothered to do. I know there are things like Feedly, but not everyone likes proprietary services and software that much. I like the fact that on Mastodon nowadays, I can follow both microbloggers and RSS feeds.

Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago

so does he believe that Swiss people do not play video games, or what

You can just ssh to the machine you want to run things on I think?

MS already doesn't have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux

Windows isn't the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway...

That is not excessively unusual; legal documents contain all kinds of vulgar things that people say to each other (maybe before or after a crime) all the time.

My favorite from my country is (translating approximately, original is in heavy dialect): "The statement 'piss off, ya dogs, so I don't hafta see ya anymore, and I'm shittin' into your wage bags' has the objective declaratory value of an immediate termination of employment."

I don't know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.

also useful, thanks, the one I linked to works for any website though, not just Lemmy instances

It's not loading for me either.

In order to not just give you a fish, but also teach you how to fish: you can check whether any website is down for everyone or just you using https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ (a short URL for this is isup.me).

This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a "tax" or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one's home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.