Yep, you still can use Android without a Google account, and you don’t have to jump through any hoops to opt out. I always set mine up w/o an account because I typically have to go through several OOBE wizards with a new device to run OTA updates, then clear the user partition and such before installing Lineage.

Yep. This “meme” is straight-up whataboutism.

Well, yeah, for banks and “official” services like that. Otherwise, it’s fraud and you’ve got a whole new set of issues to deal with.

That’s okay, too.

For me, I only let people I know use them (friends and family) with the exception of my Lemmy instance, of course (and even that’s not wide open to the world).

I’d be running these for myself whether anyone else used them or not. Unless I’m hosting for hundreds of people, the cost to run these services is the same as it is just for myself. Granted, I don’t have people gaming the system trying to backup their entire PCs to their email inbox or Nextcloud, but that’s where the trust factor (and storage quotas) comes in.

As far as being responsible for all that goes, again, the small audience of people I know personally lets me explain that it’s all “best effort”. That said, I do take my own backups and high availability seriously and they benefit from that.

How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

It’s a lot easier to ask Matt down the street to customize or add a feature than it is to ask Google, FB, etc.

Case in point: I’ve run my own email server since 2013 or so. I’ve got friends and family that use it. One of my friends asked if there was any way to setup rules to filter emails and such. I was like “yep” and added on Sieve to Dovecot and setup the webmail (Roundcube at the time) with the Sieve plugin.

Granted, that’s a pretty basic feature that pretty much all commercial email providers offer, but the point is someone asked for it and I made it happen for them.

The article mentions things like auto-payment subscription services which can definitely be a pain to deal with (even while you’re alive lol). Depending on how the payments are setup, it can be as easy as having the bank cancel the debit/credit card. For direct debit from checking accounts, though, it’s often a lot more complex to get stop payments on those (been there, unfortunately).

So leaving your account details (in a password manager, text file, notebook, etc) has some tangible benefits. At the very least, it makes it easier on your survivors to handle your affairs.

I’ve self hosted long before the privacy nightmare of modern cloud/SaaS platforms was a thing. I do it because I enjoy it (and at the time I got started, I had crap internet so having good local services like offline Wikipedia was important).

Not everyone has to self-host. I run lots of services, mostly for myself, but friends and family who don’t know a kernel driver from a school bus driver also use them. So the expectation that everyone self host is and always has been “pie in the sky”. And that’s okay.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place, you still do not own or control your data. You’re still subscribing to services instead of owning software. You can’t extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.

So rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another, pooling resources, and letting those interoperate with each other.

To make fun of an old moral panic in the 90s: “It’s 11pm. Do you know where your data is?” Yep, it’s down the street in Matt’s house.

Yeah. The only complicating factor is there are still some very stupid services that force periodic password changes (or at least I still have to deal with such stupid services with terrible password policies).

It can be, but you can’t tell it’s broken until you try to send an RCS reply. Otherwise, it appears to be working.

Last night I noticed they it broke again, so I just said hell with it and disabled Google Messages and went back to Fossify. I’m tired of re-generating PIF files. Screw RCS. Google has inserted themselves into what should be a carrier service, and they’re gatekeeping it to only Google-blessed configurations.

That’s what I’m expecting and afraid of.

Maybe for a cruise of that duration, yeah. I’m just comparing it against what I make in a year and how much it currently costs me to live in a house on land.

I could afford to make it an “or” situation but not an “and”.

And an expensive one at that.

I used to say there’s no way in hell anyone would ever get me onto a cruise ship, but this is enticing.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

What a cunt. And for the first time in a very, very long time, I do not mean that in the jocular, gender-neutral Scottish way. I mean it in the mean, American way. Including this time, I can still count the number of times on one hand that I’ve used that word in that way.

Keep it in check, Canada. (nervous laughter) We’re not equipped to deal with that right now.

I don’t use the desktop app, but the mobile app has a setting for what to do with the original file:

1. Keep in original folder
2. Move to app folder
3. Deleted

I have different sync folders setup differently depending on use case, but I typically use option #1 as my “default”.

Maybe when you setup the sync folder, you set it to delete the local files?

Also, is the OneDrive folder a “real” folder or virtual one? I’ve only used Google Drive for things like that, and the local folder just holds a skeleton of the contents and pulls from the network on-demand. It…does not play well with other sync utilities or even copying through robocopy.

For our British friends using the metric system, that’s -1 Truss

Conversion: 1 Truss (44 days) = 4 Mooches (4 x 11 days)

Then leave that to every one else to deal with; don’t make other people wear your tin-foil hat. Or just start your own community and call it “Dot’s Offbrand Extravaganza” or something.

Ugh. Just link to Reuters.

I’m starting to think the party that writes things like “the censorship cartel must be dismantled” with one hand and is banning books with the other might just be full of shit.