Don’t see why not. You can download a database of hashes and compare that locally. Granted, those hashes aren’t “free”, but that’s due to the legal status of such material. The principle itself - comparing hashes - can be foss.

Yea people can look into the algorithms to see how they work and circumvent etc., but that’s no different than with… Anything else. If someone is motivated enough to distribute the material, they’ll make their own network. Foss doesn’t make any difference here.

Make it open source on F-Droid, compatible with the Fediverse, and maybe you’ll even get 500 installs.

I find 95% of foss software to be better than the commercial alternatives, and I’m not joking. As for bugs, foss devs are usually faster to respond to bug reports and user requests too, unless it’s some mismanaged behemoth like Mozilla.

Thing is, commercial software can use the money for advertising and marketing. Foss, especially of the free to use kind, usually only spread by word of mouth, and even that only within the foss communities at first.

Let’s not get into examples, because I’m sure we can always find examples for every case and it often comes to specific preferences. My general point is, that people who think free has to be crap, and commercial has to be good, are categorically wrong.

It’s in fact backwards: if you do something only for money, you’re incentivized to do the least amount of work either for maximum effectiveness or to give yourself time to do stuff you actually want to do.

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

I’d guess different setups both of the phones and accounts. For example if one has enabled Google location in settings, and stuff like location sharing isn’t disabled, the phone will be pinged much more often. Same if you have office documents on cloud, synchronisation with phone book and stuff like that.

And yea it makes sense that an account that’s more active is of more interest to ping more regularly. Maybe also for security too. Tho I don’t know if it has to be an actual conscious decision by the designers of the systems or just some AI algorithms doing it.

I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don’t need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I’d say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I’d say that’s a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.

(Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it’s nice to introduce people who don’t use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don’t know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that’s the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it’s up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that “Reddit moment”.

*customers

Haha they definitely can’t claim there was no space for a headphone jack indeed.

But I mean, electronics is tiny, it can go with the same motherboard as a phone. The only thing it needs to be larger is a battery, and that’s a capacity/weight balance.

Speakers maybe, but that’s also a function of thinness so I don’t know how much of a difference size makes. Thin laptops sound just as crappy as anything else thin unless the vendor shells out for some expensive units.

Sadly no, but if you have a browser open, you can use emojipedia.

¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

That’s an interesting definition of “done”.

And wound you maybe, possibly care to elaborate what proxy server to use? Or do all the proxy dialogs in all your programs have one preselected? If not, then it’s hardly “done” is it?

¿¿¿Done???

Even AntennaPod connects to trackers in order to download some podcats. It’s how some of those hosts are set up. Although I hope that with an app like AP it shouldn’t be easy for advertisers to use that data to profile you, but I don’t know.

Not really. Even if you use something foss like AntennaPod, it still makes calls to tracking services. I don’t know how it works, but it seems that’s how those podcast services are set up and most won’t play otherwise.

Guess you can only use vpn or tor to be completely private, and preferably just use web sites instead of apps.

Isn’t AdGuard just DNS? That means it blocks ads from everywhere, not just the browser. But you can’t customise the blocklist unless you selfhost it.

If there’s a web extension too, then idk. If you use say, Firefox for Android, then you don’t have much choice besides uBlock, and with… Hm, other mobile browsers you don’t have any at all.

Everyone

Yea like that

They’re really nothing. If it wasn’t for the marketing, there’d be nothing of interest. I’m honestly tired of hearing about this brand all the time.

Want to make a phone for techies? Make one with a relockable bootloader, documented hardware features, available spare parts, removable battery and SD card.