Some services Ive been looking at:

• Cheapest seems to be namecheaps own offerings: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/
• Proton mail seems to be good, but I would have to pay extra for the Thunderbird integration by the look of things.

I wish they didnt double down on snaps...

Wonder if they are trying to go after all the public/open source apps that are pulling from their site and removing the ads.

It works well!

Video on technology connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsA3X40nz9w

Thanks, added to the description.

you can also use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webtoepub-for-baka-tsuki/ for many many sites. I like using it on royal road with a delay so that the site does not get DDOSed by me wanting to read a couple of authors (and then I usually buy the physical/ebooks later when they are more polished).

I never conect my kindle/kobo/ebook readers to the internet. Calebre makes it soooo much easier.

https://www.baen.com/allbooks/ has been letting people download ebooks for a loooong time. Great little site.

They also have a collection of free books: https://www.baen.com/categories/free-library.html

One of the more ethical choices. You get the books in multiple formats and you own it.

Or "pirate" the drug like they do with insulin.

Yep same with PoPOS. Great little distro. It's been my daily driver for years now.

Your probably right. And if an instance defederates with others, it may look like the number of users dropped without actually dropping.

Yeah thats another good one. Its almost like it would be useful to see what each tracker would do in the following scenarios:

1. Create a persona instance with a couple of accounts (like 3)

2. See what each site says

3. Create a post/ create comment/ upvote sample post.

4. Ban an account (How many active users are now being counted? How many comments? Did that comment/post go away retroactively?)

5. other such experiments....

6. Let everyone know the results.

Wish I had more time.