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madmanwebon "Poisoned Wells," the largest study of website blocking in India to date

madmanwebon Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.

madmanwebon Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

Is what a priority? Keeping our blue ticks? Well, the purpose of the blue tick was originally to show that the person was someone of note and not a random anon user or impersonator, and to authenticate that. They had specific criteria to meet.

Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.

madmanwebon Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

As far as I know, Twitter Blue is not available in my region. The page says "We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand." Clicking the "Try Twitter Blue" link on their site just redirects me to my home page.

madmanwebon Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

I have a blue tick on Twitter but there is no way in hell I'm paying $20 per month for it. I live in India and $240 per year is a fair chunk of money for people in many parts of Asia. It costs more than my software subscriptions. Only rich celebs will keep it. I guess Musk just doesn't care about the lower income countries out there.

madmanwebon Self-hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest

I tried to set up an account on the ImprovMX service the article recommend. Their verification email never reached my GMail account. Nothing in spam either. That's a non-starter straight away.

madmanwebon It's time to bring back the AIM away message

Oh god no. My keyboard doesn't have autocorrect and therefore doesn't fuck up my messages where I'm correcting the damn phone's keyboard mistakes 25% of the time, especially when you're multilingual and have to slip in local language words into a largely English conversation (common situation here in India).

I tweeted in jest about this and this is not even hyperbole. This literally happened while trying to swipe on my phone keyboard for "yesterday" - https://twitter.com/madmanweb/status/1513786589230493696

I've been using PC keyboards for 30+ years so it's just faster for me. I use Whatsapp (like most of my country) and prefer to have the desktop client open on my PC so I can type much faster and see everything on a larger screen.