Sphere

Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.

I always just turn DRM off and don’t subscribe to these things… Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.

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.

Surprised it’s not zero already honestly.

This was an utterly terrible idea to begin with and it’s still a terrible idea for Android apps as well. Apart from messing with ad blockers, this has the ironically “helpful” feature of allowing malware to be force loaded into your browser. If it ends up in Android, some popular app that uses it will get owned and then every user of the app will also end up getting owned as well.

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.

Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn’t exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It’s completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don’t respect your privacy. Remember, there’s always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.

I think what’s likely to happen isn’t that we’ll see one replacement for YouTube, but a large number of niche and possibly subscription based or peer to peer sites that collectively end up offering everything of value that YouTube does/used to.

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.

Handing it to LibreOffice or Abiword I guess. Or for cloud fans, Google Docs. I don’t think anyone is going to go without a word processor because of this.

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.

Brave Search is now frequently beating DDG and Startpage for accuracy of search results. It’s like using Google 10 years ago when it was actually good but without the ads, tracking and pestering to “log in”. Good stuff.

So instances that are actually supporting CSAM material can and should be dealt with by law enforcement. That much is simple (and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done with certain … instances, to be honest). But I think the apparently less clearly solved issues have known and working solutions that apply to other parts of the web as well. No content moderation is perfect, but in general, if admins are acting in good faith, I don’t think there should be too much of a problem:

• For when federation inadvertently spreads some of the material through to other instances’ databases: Isn’t this the same situation as when ISP’s used to cache web traffic to save on bandwidth costs? In that situation, too, browsed web pages would end up in the ISP’s cache which could then harbour whatever material the user was looking at. As I recall, the ISP would just ban CSAM and other illegal material in their terms of service, and remove anyone reported as violating the rule, and that sufficed.
• As for “bad” instances/users: It’s impossible to block all instances and all users that might disseminate this material as you’d have to go to a “block everything, then allow known entities” rule which would break the Fediverse model. Again, users or site admins found to be acting in bad faith should be blocked and reported (either automatically or manually). Some may slip through the net, but as long as admins are seen to be doing the best they can, that should be enough.

There seem to be concerns about “surveillance” of material on Mastodon, which strikes me as a bit odd. Mastodon isn’t a private platform. People who want private messaging should use an E2EE messaging app like Signal, not a social networking platform like Mastodon (or Twitter, Threads etc.). Mastodon data is already public and is likely already being surveilled, and will be so regardless of what anyone involved with the network wants, because there’s no access control on it anyway. Having Mastodon itself contain code to keep the network clean, even if it only applies to part of the network, just allows those Mastodon admins who are running that part of the code to take some of the responsibility on themselves for doing so, reducing the temptation for third parties to do it for them.

Proprietary social networks that exploit users’ rage and addiction-prone personalities crashing and burning.

If this kind of thing becomes widespread, then people will find a way to broadcast fake anti-camera signals as well. Imagine a thief breaks into your house and you want your security cameras to record them… but guess what, the thief broadcasts an anti-camera signal and they all switch off, completely neutralising your security system. “Unintended side-effects”

Expensive and impossible to customise effectively, making it much poorer value than Android. Not that Android is perfect. The instant some form of non-proprietary Linux (like Debian w/phosh, PostmarketOS, etc.) becomes viable as a daily driver, Android is out as well.

Reading books, listening to music or just getting on with things - but there were definitely replacements for modern mobile social media. Sending long SMS messages, or before that, email, or before that, physical snail mail or spending hours on a wired landline phone talking to someone. Occasionally using an internet cafe or satellite phone. Chatting, messaging or gaming on BBS’s. And so on.

Some of the best deals on Low End Box come in a fair bit cheaper than that. Not so long ago there were truly low-end deals on OpenVZ in the realm of $1-$2 per month, and I’ve seen Racknerd servers for $20 a year. If you’re going to pay $5/mo you could get Linode/Akamai, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. It all depends what you want specs-wise and what your risk appetite is - the lower-end / newer players might be less reliable than the more established ones, use older hardware, or have additional AUP restrictions on them. It’s a matter of matching your needs carefully with what you are buying.