deweydecibel

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

Oh, so /r/drama shitposting is here now? Wonderful.

Give Summit a try. It’s got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it’s far and away the closest I’ve found.

Can it be set up so you never have to worry about account switching? Unified feed from all accounts, then if I load up a Lemmy.world post, it defaults to the Lemmy.world account, but if I want to post to Dbzer0, can I set it to shift to that account automatically?

I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

And the fact they provide those configurations is important in and of itself. Configurable software is falling more and more out of fashion.

The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.

But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”

You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.

As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.

Are we ignoring the part where you can disable it the same way you always could?

They even when out of their way to assure you if you already had telemetry disabled, absolutely nothing is changing for you and no data is being collected now.

I understand your feeling, but I think massive advertising is needed.

Why is it “needed”?

This is high level marketing, basically telling the general public there is another way other than big tech

Why do they care about attracting all these people?

Every one of them increases their operating costs, and doesn’t provide revenue if they stay in the free tier. Why do they want to increase their numbers so badly?

Why isn’t it enough to just make a good product and let that be what brings people in?

The only reason for this kind of aggressive advertising is because they’re making a push for growth. They want to become one of those “big tech” companies.

Let me be clear, I’m not shaming them for advertising their services. But I’m uncomfortable with the scale and aggression with which they do it. They are putting money into this, and a lot of it. It’s not like they’re a non-profit, the end goal is pretty obvious here.

We’ve been through this before with so many other tech companies, Proton will be no different. It’s just entering the honeymoon phase, is all.

This is honestly what puts me off using Proton. They advertise way too much and way too aggressively. It’s just a bad vibe for a company that’s trying to set itself up as an alternative to Google.

I use Tutanota but I’m looking to find something else because I’m sick of platforms that lock you into their ecosystem, and the fact they don’t provide any means of using other mail clients like Thunderbird has become a deal breaker.

Problem is there doesn’t seem to be consensus on third place.

At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?

Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don’t know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can’t protect you from.

It shouldn’t be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It’s not like their marketing team isn’t aware of the fact most people don’t know any better.

It’s in their best interests, too, because it doesn’t matter how many times you say “we provide privacy not anonymity”, the headlines are a bad look.

I know it’s not the point, but I love the completely arbitrary bit where they’re walking down a road together, and has absolutely no bearing on anything the happens.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

Other problems include newpipe having an old material interface

That’s a selling point for me.

The app or frontend you’re using you’re using is probably smart enough to ignore the period at the end of the link

Well, the weird thing is they haven’t actually done anything to the app yet. Looks like they’re just focusing on the next major release. The version that has been available in the store for the last 2 years hasn’t been fucked with.

If you’re still using Nova 7, it’s fine. If you installed the beta for version 8, that’s the one they’ve been working on after the buyout.

Not yet. Nova Launcher 8 is the problem version and it’s still in beta. If you’re still using version 7, particularly 7.0.57, then it’s the version from before the buyout and it’s clean. It’s suspected they turned some analytics on with 7.0.58, but even that still looks clean to me. That is the only update they’ve pushed since the buyout.

My guess is they didn’t want to fuck with the current version, they just wanted to devote their focus to getting all the tracking shit into the upcoming major release.

If you disable auto updates now, you’ll probably be fine until it stops working

Yes, nothing is exactly like Nova. But lots of other stuff is good too.

Then they aren’t good alternatives, they’re passable.

Seems crazy to me that the software that’s owned by an analytics company is also the one focused on giving the user the most customization options. None of the FOSS alternatives have the same mentality as Nova. They’re all focused more on minimalism, or evoking Pixel, or pushing a specific niche type of interface of their own design. None of them provide anywhere near as many tools to the user.

If I have to use a closed source app provided by an analytics company just to get a launcher that actually empowers the user, so be it. Maybe more of the FOSS alternatives could start taking note of why Nova is the most popular.

I think they’re talking about Nova.