Frankly, this sounds kinda conspiratorial. You’re not willing to step into a local shop for fear that it might not actually be a local shop?

Otherwise, there truly are more options in my area than in your area, in which case, I’m sorry to hear that.

(Edit: typo)

Truthfully, the only ones I’m aware of are the “In the News” panel of Wikipedia’s English landing page, and wikinews.org.

I’d be curious to hear what suggestions others have, too

I think the very best alternative to Amazon is: don’t shop online at all. Support your local businesses!

Surely there’s shops in your area where you can get those kinds of things – your list doesn’t have anything too exotic or difficult to obtain. Unless your tastes are out of the ordinary somehow.

Spam detection is HARD to get right. How do you ensure your spam filter never has false positives? How do you know #2 on your list won’t cause problems later? And most people don’t have time for item #3, sifting through everything in the ‘waiting room’ which will never be empty.

Your system seems to implement a whitelist of people who would be even allowed to contact you. That goes against the fundamental “push” nature of email, if you see what I mean. Remember that just because an email is unsolicited, doesn’t mean it’s spam.

Nah. Seems like a waste of time and money, and I am deeply skeptical of any ecological benefit it’d have. I think it is far more pressing to protect today’s endangered species – which is something we can do RIGHT NOW.

This is the right answer. I certainly wouldn’t say that Lemmy is “for” programmers, but it attracts a certain kind of audience, doesn’t it.

It all started with my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that we needed to buy for school. When I realized it was exactly the same way to make your own games, I learned ActionScript 2.0 to make early Adobe Flash interactive thingies. Then I wanted to make computers do “real” things, beyond the sandbox that is a Flash program. That’s when I picked up Bash, and then Ruby, and then C… eventually you can fast forward to today, where I make a living as a build engineer working on the code for speakers and headphones!

“Please leave.”

Too true