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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Speaking as a non-Meta user for the past several years, I just centre my interactions around people who use the various forms of social media (mostly open source and no FB / insta etc) …

    If people fall out of touch because they don’t want to move away from Meta, they’re not people I want to spend my time talking to. A degree of stubbornness is required, but eventually I’ve found sufficient interactions are possible on more desirable platforms, and I don’t miss Meta at all, nor the people I left behind there.


  • Doesn’t the phrase “wrong ideas” worry you a bit? I don’t agree with everything Stallman says, but I think he has a right to say it, just the same as others have the right to say they don’t like it and think he’s a horrible pig or whatever. This is, of course, very different from acting on beliefs like his, which could certainly end up being harmful.

    But when we as a society get to the point where we say an idea is wrong, it provokes the individual to act on the idea rather than talk about it. That’s why freedom of speech is so important. Let the idea air and argue with it in a civilised way, and these things will sort themselves out.




  • The alternative exists, but it costs money. Most big YouTuber accounts (at least the ones I’m subscribed to) post on either Nebula, Patreon or some platform like that. It would cost quite a lot to subscribe to them all, but still less than YouTube premium in my country. So in the worst case scenario where YouTube really blocks all ad free interfaces except paid use, that’s my answer. I don’t like it as I think a lot of the content is overpriced for what it is, but it’s better than having $$$ swallowed up by some mega corporation that is just interested in screwing authors and viewers over as much as possible.



  • Signal. Also, the solution to the “no-one on signal” problem is simply to refuse to use insecure platforms like WhatsApp. If people want to talk to you then, they have to download signal. They might get annoyed with you, but sometimes a bit of coercion is necessary to get people to do what’s good for them.


  • Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.

    I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.




  • And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.



  • Interesting for the alternative OS options - a device like this one would be great if there were some really good serviceable Linux distro for phones … And yes, I know they exist, but they’re not up to the level needed by most people for a daily driver. As for Android, it’s a nice idea to have a phone that lasts that long, but would it actually be reliable and fast enough to use for 8 years?

    Sadly, no option to get this in Australia besides grey import, which is going to be pricey. I’m going to keep an eye on the way this line of phones goes in future, but for me at the moment there are too many unknowns and the price tag is too high.



  • I think these are “nice to have” features rather than absolutely essential, but:

    For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That’s the only bit that’s really slow to copy over by hand.

    For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn’t scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.