Thats pretty reasonable. I’m sure there are a ton of orphan accounts just lingering out there. Including accounts that other people may like to have.

All of these companies are tightening their belts. Those interest rates going up are sure making companies reassess their business models.

Because fuck that bot in particular!

I want to throw AntennaPod out there for anyone looking for a solid android podcast app. Its FOSS as well for those that care about that sorta thing.

https://antennapod.org/

The road to (technological) serfdom

You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.

I think that’s stupid.

But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.

If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?

That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.

Then apply that logic to Facebook and relax.

Everyone is losing their minds over this.

100% but I believe these are typically locked down to one domain, and in this case its not.

At least thats how I understand it. So I guess the article is a little misleading in that sense, but the net effect is the same. You have carte blanche access to the web, via android system webview, thats acting as a de-facto out-of-band browser. So its misconfigured or not locked down, which means you can use it effectively as a “hidden” browser.

BeyondPod

I’ve been using it for years. I have the paid version of it.

I’m sure I barely use any of the features. At the end of the day it lets me download my podcasts and prunes them as I listen (as I’ve configure it).

I feel like I need to buy it again to give the dev some money.

Ubuntu is the typical go-to.

Id recommend pop!_os personally.

Fedora is another great option.

The reality is, as a new Linux user, you’ll probably hop around quite a bit. I say go for it! Try out everything you want.

As crappy as googles results seem to have gotten over the last year, anytime I try to set my browser default search to anything else, I end up irritated and going back to Google for 50% of my searches(maybe even more ). Bing is fairly decent, but if the goal is privacy…

The alternative search engines just always lack the context–ehich presumably google has from me by pilfering my information for the last 2 decades.

That’s a really solid point. I guess it depends on the phone. The low end Android market probably isn’t holding up as well as the high end or iphones.

My pixels seem to last as long as it takes for me to pay them off before they just black screen and brick themselves. I had 3 pixel threes, since two replaces under warranty and the last one died a few weeks outside.

Meanwhile my wifes iphone was just fine. She only changed because her dad got the latest and greatest and handed down this last-year model to her. So I could see batteries being an issue over time.

It feels like this fight is 5-7 years late. I am glad the EU actually tries to regulate on behalf of the consumer vs what the US has been doing lately(almost nothing), but the EU does it in a ham-handed way half the time.

I don’t necessarily want a user replaceable battery on my phone. I prefer it not be chonky and I prefer it to be water and dust proof. All of those features impact me sooo much more than being able to change the battery.

Also batteries have come so far this past decade it almost seems like a non issue.

I used it to help a friend with a cover letter for a job. I pasted in what my friend had written and asked if it could make it sound better. It literally just made up stuff to make it sound better.

People keep posting that, but where that specific example breaks down is that xmpp requires network effects to work. You need your friends to use the same system and it’s more person to person interaction.

They have a lot more leverage because if you want to talk to your friend, then you have to use their setup.

Link aggregators, forums, reddit, and lemmy/kbin work differently. Your friends use them but you probably don’t interact directly.

It’s about the community.

And I’m not really sure how Meta changes that. They are creating a thing for their Instagram users (using activitypub protocol??) and they are planning on allowing people to move their mastodon accounts over to their thing. Their thing that doesn’t federate. It’s a walled garden.

Those people, if they move, are required to follow Facebooks terms of service. Well no shit? You just moved to Facebook.

What’s being forced on anyone?

If they “enhance” the protocol and attract people to their service…then what? You can’t stop people from using a different service. Tildes could take off and pull people from the fediverse. Tildes could offer a service to import your account. How does that impact the rest of the fediverse??

Just keep using this. Build your community and carry on.

Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?

Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.

That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?

I don’t get the sentiment.

Yea, I don’t have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.

I like discord. The name change hubbub was…a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server…cool? How does that impact me?

It’s also incredibly important to note that they are making this explicitly opt-in. So none of that ‘dark pattern’ mumbo jumbo with the tyranny of the default–where companies opt you in and most users dont realize they have to opt-out.

All in all they are going about this the right way it seems. The devil will be in the de-identifying technical details imo.

All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that’s reddit. I can’t stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.

They forced my app to close down so I guess that’s that.

I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they’d eventually back off somewhat. But they’ve tripled down on it.

This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.

I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.

Basically, I’m realizing I don’t need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.

I’m not saying I’d never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don’t trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?

Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it’s been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.

The “right to be forgotten” rules are, with all due respect to the EU regulators, pretty shortsighted.

I think the initial “right to be forgotten” lawsuit that Google faced from that Spanish guy-- where he claimed bankruptcy years prior. People( potential lenders?) kept finding that information online through google searches. He sued to have Google remove those sites from the index. He won and the Spanish Judge told Google they had to remove those results from searches.

But it didn’t change that the information was still on each site. Those sites, the ones that actually held the information didn’t get sued, just Google.

It also opened the door for oppressive governments covering up human rights abuses or hide other information they dont want widely available.

Google appealed and won: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

I also want to point out that this Spanish guy’s situation is very different from “posting publicly on social media”. He was getting written about by others and the courts eventually said “no, this can stand. This information should remain available”. So I imagine, public statements made by an individual certainly wouldn’t qualify to be forgotten.

At the end of the day, to me, this is a technical decision not a privacy one.

I think this is a great point. I would say its much less of a privacy issue and more of a technical issue.

I think deletions should propagate across all instances and there should be a level of trust between federated servers that they will make those deletions as requested. If only because we’d have a mismatch and orphan comments lingering in perpetuity and we could end up with wildly inconsistent data across the fediverse.