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!

The GPL doesn’t “encourage” redistribution. It requires it.

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.

Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?

To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)

There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.

if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.

Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?

I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?

Now this is a hot take!

I dont know if I agree with you, but its making me think.

I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

 -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

 -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.

So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

It gives a good short history of how we got here.

He’s the embodiment of “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”*

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.

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.