I was going to block them and lemmygrad at first but decided not to and instead tried to understand what all these people were about.

Now I’m a communist, have a hammer and sickle, live in China, and my favorite color is red. Death to America comrades! Get fucked libs /s

Seriously though, they’re not anymore insane than us. Maybe just a bunch of drunken commies at a bar who don’t really bother to distance themselves from the subjects of a century of red scare propaganda. In any case, it’s worth keeping an open mind and engaging in good faith.

Though as leftist as I personally am and have become in time, I’m not going to call anyone comrade or start using hammer and sickle imagery except in the context of history lol. Libs can still get fucked though.

What about Google Play Services? A pre-installed Swiss army knife of a system app with proprietary code and apps relying on it as a dependency seems to check the box.

I’m only on the fediverse but I miss algorithms. Recommended accounts (which to be fair exists on a corner of Mastodon), similar accounts to one you just followed, custom home feed, suggested posts, etc. Discoverability sucks on fedi and the lack of interest from devs for some sort of private FOSS implementation is disappointing.

Loops was like let’s have a “For You” algo early this year but even that seems to be a dead idea.

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Edit: nevermind I typed a lot but that Lemmygrad user made a far better post that I agree with.

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There is no metadata harvesting on Signal and the use of a phone number is so convenient and helped massively with adoption from the general unaware public.

I loved that it acted as a private and secure drop in replacement for SMS (particularly before they removed that integration) that does what I needed and does it very well and easily connects me with people that already have my number. This made sharing Signal very easy. The only data Signal has to even provide to the authorities is your registration date, phone number, and time of last connection. The absolute minimum. It’s fantastic. If you compare this to Whatsapp which has everything but the exact content of your messages, it’s not even a contest.

For myself on Signal and everyone else I’ve known that that uses Whatsapp or Insta or whatever, the extra absolute anonymity of also removing phone numbers from the already small equation just isn’t needed or worth it, otherwise you wouldn’t be using Signal, let alone fucking Facebook.

Heh

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Capitalism baby. Gotta cannibalize, monopolize, and enshittifize for maximum profits.

giggles in F-Droid

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You beat me to it

So they can hear me type p + enter into my browser?

It hurts to think about the timelines that could have been.

I wish you could slap a custom rom on whatever phone you want and it Just Works™ like you can slap linux on any PC, but instead we get apps that potentially don’t work, locked bootloaders, push notifications tied to Google Play Services, and whatever else. You can put Lineage on the EU version of my phone but not the US version because fuck you. I hate how corpo centric phones have become. Like Google shouldn’t be allowed to hijack my entire screen for an ad or an app update. The entire modern definition of “sideloading” is BS, apps have access by default to things that they really don’t need, and why do I need to use ADB to purge your pre-installed bloatware ffs

Not cool.

Tab groups are in the works but we haven’t heard anything new about it since March.

Google sneezes and your future is stolen by an ad that’s selling it back to you. Google is too big to exist.

I like the way your mind works.

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