I checked out the website, and it looks more like Instagram than TikTok. We've had a few TikTok-like apps, and it didn't work out. Even the people behind Vine couldn't make their own Byte app take off:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddles_(app)

TikTok showed that the platform lives and dies by the algorithm and ease of use. I'm not even a huge fan of TikTok's recommendations these days with too much slop slipping through the cracks. And their comment moderation is some of the worst.

If another platform ever gets popular enough, I'm sure the same people will find another way to neutralize it.

Yeah, I read about this thing called network effects on blue sky.

stream.place[1] operates in a similar way but for stream livechats! We haven't even begun to scratch the surface on how Bluesky comments are going to be used, apparently.

[1]: https://stream.place

I just tried to download a podcast series from Spotify today, and even this turned out to be a massive pain: no dice on gallery-dl, yt-dlp, and the browser doesn't have a dedicated download option, even when logged in.

I was redirected to the Windows app to download an episode, and then I got denied from using the app because I was on a VPN with a different location than the one they had on file for me.

Genuinely wonder how much podcast history we're going to lose, if we're just making walled gardens out of RSS feeds at this point. Hope someone does back up the Spotify-exclusive podcasts somewhere.

    Undo Close Tab - A very handy add-on, adds a button to quickly undo
    a closed tab. There is probably a shortcut for that, but I
    cannot bother remembering it.

It's Ctrl+Shift+T for those wondering. Works similarly if the last thing you closed was a window.

To be be honest, the worst Google-like thing about the before and after is how you have to scroll down to see actual results. On my iPhone, I get half of an app showing below the full sponsored app.

Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.

Hydro Flask cooler cup. No more rushing to finish cans before they get lukewarm.

Give these people the Nobel Prize as far as I'm concerned.

https://www.hydroflask.com/12-oz-cooler-cup

I remember these from their weird Twitter posting, too. I muted them because they sounded like some weird astroturfing for Twitter that kept getting recommended.

https://x.com/ReclaimTheNetHQ

Markdown and Mermaid support, you have my attention!

What's the temperature on Pelican [https://getpelican.com] these days?

Best Python SSG is mostly down to Hugo and Pelican as far as I can tell.

I've always loved SSGs, but ActivityPub integration is also looking very attractive absent wider adoption of RSS.

Pelican is what I use, and it works well.

I used to use Nikola, but gave up on that for two reasons. One was it was adding every possible feature which meant an ever growing number of dependencies which gets scary. And that is hard to use - eg how do you embed a youtube video becomes a trawl through documentation, plugins, arbitrary new syntax etc.

But the biggest problem and one that can affect all the SSG is that they try to do incremental builds by default. Nikola of the time was especially bad at that - it didn't realise some changes mattered such as changes to config files, themes, templates etc, and was woolly on timestamps of source files versus output files.

This meant it committed the cardinal sin: clean builds produce different output from incremental builds

Pelican has kept it simple.

I don't know if Pelican is as popular nowadays or not...but i've used it for a few years now...and it does the trick quite nicely! I'd highly recommend it!

I think the only downside is that the project site's documentation feels like its really well done...up to a point...Like they were on a great roll documenting stuff really well, and then stopped at like ~90% completion. By this i mean that the high level stuff is well documented...but little details are missing for the last 10%...Then again, it could be that because i only use python a little here or there, that maybe that's why some things "seem" like they're missing a few details. By the way, if any project maintainers are out there, please do not take offense at my opinion here, as I value very much what the project maintainers do (i mean, i still use Pelican)!

Other than my feelings towards the documentation, if you don't need to customize too much stuff w/Pelican, then its a really great SSG.

I use pelican, with a bunch of self-made plugins, and it works very well. There's a few commits every month, so it's not a dead project.

Happy Pelican user. If you know Python, it's the way to go.

Do you snapshot everything into a venv to insulate from upstream changes?

No, but I probably should.

To be frank, in using it for well over a decade I think something broke only once or twice. It's pretty stable and they give plenty of deprecation warnings.

YouTube does this too when I'm on a VPN through a different country, and it doesn't seem to have a lang: operator to steer it in the right direction.

I'd ironically like more results in certain languages - just not language of the VPN location.

Drives me nuts.