This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the “free” web that we are used to.

No, I’m not saying that selling out one’s personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn’t sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.

I guess it depends on how this “Data Protection Review Court” actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn’t seem to really matter much to US agencies so we’ll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We’ve had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.

We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.

The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.

https://matomo.org/

I don’t want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.

But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger “main” network, and everything in-between.

Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.

Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.