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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Yeah for sure, it’s pretty fucked. Hopefully I can do my banking through a web browser if my bank ever decides to pull some dumb shit like that.

    One thing that really fucks me off, are schools requiring students to use proprietary nonfree software. Windows, adobe, MS office, etc

    IMO all schools should be using desktop Linux, and teaching students on free and open source software.

    It respects student freedom and privacy, and doesn’t unfairly punish the less financially fortunate. On top of that, it teaches students important lessons about sharing and collaboration. Imagine what the FOSS movement might look like if free and open source became the standard in education.




  • I highly recommend lineageOS, or better yet lineageOS with microg.

    Running a completely degoogled android phone right now, and it feels smooth as butter. Microg has gotten so good, the vast majority of playstore apps work completely fine even without Google services, including things like my banking apps.

    Feels liberating as fuck, not gonna lie.

    Only apps that don’t work for me are ones that require IaP’s. About 30% of those I can crack with LuckyPatcher. I can also crack other paid apps with license protection.

    Mostly I havent needed to do any of that though, because I’ve found that there are so many great open source apps that do the things I need.


  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, defederation should be removed from the protocol. (And replaced with a default ban list that can be overriden by the user).

    Each instance should basically just be a set of default settings that are used to access the same shared pool of content.

    This removes the new user hurdle, because they can now join any instance and not be worried that they are making some important, permanent decision. If they find that they don’t like something about the instance, they can tweak their settings later.

    Also, some of the other solutions to this issue carry significant risks. Pushing users towards a ‘default’ instance increases centralization. Apps that are preconfigured to use a specific instance are even worse (since people wont want to change instance if it means giving up a familiar app). Without some degree of vigilance decentralized services tend to centralize over time. This gives too much power over the entire fediverse to a handful of instance admins. If an instance with 60% of all users starts defederating all smaller instances, most users will just migrate to the larger instance.

    This isn’t just some theoretical that I pulled out of my ass, its an easily abusable weakness of federated services. It has been abused in the past, and there is no reason to believe it wont be abused again.

    Google used it to kill XMPP. Facebook will almost certainly use it to kill mastodon, once they siphon enough users and content to build a critical mass. Microsoft is so notorious for using this strategy that they has their own internal phrase for it: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish


  • I haven’t really noticed that tbh, though I definitely believe it. A sizeable portion of people who populate ‘alternative’ platforms, are the people who get kicked off of, or censored on, mainstream platforms.

    Unfortunately, that often means that those platforms struggle to attract regular users and content, since regular users are scared away by the existing users bad behavior…

    The only way I can see those platforms really getting over that hump, is when the major platforms make stupid, overreaching, and greedy decisions. Pushing their regular users away, and onto those alternative platforms.

    I don’t know what it will take to get ‘regular’ users migrating off of youtube. But I can tell you right now that I will NOT accept watching ads, nor will I ever pay a cent to google.

    The day that I am unable to block ads on youtube will be the last day that I use it.





  • Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.

    When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.

    Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?

    Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.