Saying they do E2EE but not doing it would be a literal massive scale fraud. Can’t say I put Meta past those behaviors to be fair though lol

But as the other guy said, metadata is already a lot.

I will never forget whoever decided it would be a good idea to conflate “FOSS” and “open-source” to mean the same fucking thing, and to have to refer to software that has open source code “source available”. I see this exact fucking discussion going on at the very minimum once a week…

Edit: I know it’s a common misconception. My point is that it’s a misconception because of the term choice. There’s a reason we have to explain it over and over and over again.

Every time I see Slack/Discord et Al. described as such, I wonder if any of these people actually used any of those. By use, I mean actually try out its features, not just treating it as IRC (“just” channels, messages and DMs for text convos).

I hate Discord with a passion, but pretending like it’s just “fancy IRC” is IMHO pretty absurd.

My Windows partition is basically just games and audio software for this very reason.

I’m not too sure if “it uses a different encryption algorithm” is enough to differentiate from the competition. And to be perfectly honest, from one developer to another, I’m always extremely skeptical when a developer says “I plan to develop X” before I see something concrete like a codebase or some kind of alpha 😛

It absolutely presupposes that you give some level of legitimacy to an electoral system to partake in it. Otherwise, how does one have any internal consistency?

“Go vote” and “call your representative” presupposes you both believe there’s a genuine, believably electable option out there that’s gonna really fight for you on this subject, and that the electoral system you live in is legitimately going to represent your vote. There’s an argument to be made against both points, depending on where you live.

This point gets tricky once things become ubiquitous enough. If I did decide not to use their services (specifically Messenger), I’d be cutting myself off from communicating with 90% of my family, unfortunately. So yeah, it’s a choice that can be made… But how much of a choice is it, in practice?

YouTube is basically the only video platform where the vast majority video creators are gathered on. PeerTube and the likes are nice, but for the most part, don’t even play in the same league, IMHO. YMMV depending on the content you like to consume, of course.

I mostly use a combination of DDG/Brave, but I have to fall back on Google Search way more often than I’d like to find some things. Especially for local (geographically speaking) stuff or non-English content…

It sucks that they dominate so much, but it’s not particularly difficult to guess why your average person still use them, no?

We’re talking 2% of revenue, not income, so just straight up pre-expense money-in. That Meta fine was literally 10% of their net income for 2022.

Some apps let you create an email account first then link socials/OAuth providers on top, so there’s that. But other times it’s indeed a good solution. Unless the site uses validation that doesn’t allow for subaddress extension.

To be fair, GDPR fines can go up to 2% of worldwide revenue. Meta was hit by a $1.3G fine just this year, which for 2022 fiscal year ($116.6G) accounts for 1.1% of their revenue.

But yeah. Most fines are mostly just the cost of business for those billionaire companies, and the ones that may not be, the army of lawyers they pay a fortune to have on payroll to fight tooth and nail against them, that must logically be cheaper than what those fines really end up costing them, should give a hint.

Not always so simple either - wildly depends on the specific feature. Take Web Environment Integrity. Yes, Brave, Vivaldi or Edge could take it and refuse to roll with it. But with Chrome having a de facto monopoly, all it takes is some industry buying in (most likely banks or similar), and it would mean a browser not implementing this new API effectively cuts itself from a bunch of users cause their bank website won’t work (and will tell them to download Chrome).

The point they were making is about the underlying browser technology. Chrome and nowadays pretty much every major browser except Safari are based on Chromium. Except Firefox. Chromium is technically an open-source project and has external contributors, but in reality, it’s still very much controlled by Google. See the BS they constantly pull off, leveraging their monopolistic position to cram in non-standard stuff nobody asked for except Google: Manifest V3, FLoC, Web Environment Integrity, etc. Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, and a bunch of others, they all ship Chromium with their own features sprinkled on top. You’re still effectively using the Google product, just indirectly.

I don’t think saying Firefox/Mozilla is against standards is a fair assessment.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

What they state is that this specific proposal means more hurdles to access the internet as an end user with no clear benefit, as it doesn’t really achieve its stated end goal of reducing spam/bots/etc.