It isn’t like it’s a niche secret that YouTube siphons people’s privacy and sells their personal information. Creators being ignorant about that might have been a excuse a decade ago, but not now. I don’t think we should be excusing content creators who collaborate with and benefit from the machinery of viewer-exploitative content distribution that is YouTube.

Edit: also, you’re here in a privacy community defending the violation of privacy that you yourself originally described as dystopian. I’m not trying to be confrontational with you, here. I genuinely do not understand how you can think that content creators bear no responsibility for the dystopian situation you’ve encountered. Certainly they don’t bear all the responsibility for what YouTube does, but they chose to support YouTube by uploading monetized content there.

I’m not saying they should be canceled for that, but appreciated for it? Let’s not.

can’t even show your appreciation without selling more information

The content producer you’re trying to show appreciation for is the one who put their content on a platform that forces you to sell your information in order to appreciate them. Maybe let’s not appreciate those who do that.

The fact that other publications are more right leaning than The Guardian doesn’t make it left leaning. It’s a liberal paper, supporting liberal positions and routinely expressing opposition to leftists like Corbyn. In my book, support for liberalism and opposition to leftism makes it a right wing publication.

We USians often don’t realize that the Guardian is a right wing publication. A frustrating number of people in US circles (especially liberals who don’t know they aren’t leftists) think anything European/UK is ideal and that conservatives don’t have any influence there.

It’s an issue for accuracy in the comparison images that were posted.

Why would using Apple’s walled garden be a solution to Android becoming a walled garden? I can’t understand why this sentiment of moving to use Apple comes up so often lately.

I mean, media didn’t get copied over from the past, only from the point I connected it on, so it never functioned as a backup. I’ve still got years of message data on my phone that I want to sync to somewhere else so I can get rid of this phone.

Awesome, thanks! I’ve already got it connected to desktop since months ago and it’s not syncing, so I assume I’ll need to disconnect/reconnect in order to trigger the prompt. I’ll give it a shot.

How do you do that? I really need to, because my phone storage is full and I don’t want to lose Signal media sent over the years by my SO. I’ve poked around in the settings and can’t see any way to backup to desktop.

All I can find is a link that goes to a documentation site that says you can’t transfer from Android to Desktop: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages#desktop_restore

I’m interpreting the term in the way it’s defined according to Wikipedia:

User experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.

Facetime being intentionally limited to a single platform absolutely negatively impacts it’s UX by reducing utility, ease of use, and efficiency.

So you don’t consider it an impact on the experience of using a product when it either does or doesn’t function on your device? Sounds like a most basic concept of UX to me, but I dunno what you mean, maybe.

It was definitely on purpose, because privacy is more important to Signal than line-go-up adoption number statistics.

SMS is dangerous and insecure and everyone should stop using it immediately.

Literally all of that UX is the same and better in other apps though.

For example, every single part of your description applies to video and text conversations with my SO and friends, except we all use Signal. It “just works”, and better than Facetime because it doesn’t matter what device my SO and friends have.

With Facetime it doesn’t “just work” at all with the large number of people I know who don’t have Apple. That’s a huge disadvantage which means that Facetime UX sucks.

It’s not that simple for everyone, though. I can’t deposit a check through my credit union’s website, unfortunately. Also, because it’s a credit union instead of a corporate bank, it’s not like there’s a branch next door or anything. The closest branch is literally a day or two of driving away from me. I have to use a mobile phone and their app to do check deposits.

No? That’s not what I said. I’m assuming here that you are engaging in good faith, though I’m genuinely puzzled how you can continue to draw the conclusions you seem to have drawn from reading what I wrote above.

What I did say is that the people posting content without getting compensated for it are more likely to be doing it out of pure passion. The people posting on corporate platforms who also refuse to post on open platforms are doing it primarily for the money. They undeniably are less passionate about their content because of that. If they were as passionate as the first group, then they’d also be uploading to open platforms because it would be more important to them to get the content shared than to be guaranteed revenue from every single platform.

I also said that the people who are posting content on open platforms without any promise of revenue are more in need of donations than people posting solely on corporate platforms that have a revenue model rewarding creators. The latter group is already getting compensated by their corporate sponsors and ads. The former are not being paid on the open platforms, and need viewer donations far more because of that. I can’t see how any of this is controversial in any way. Artists deserve to be compensated for their work, most especially when they openly give their work into the commons.

I must have written it in a confusing way or something, because people seem to have missed my point.

I’m making an argument that we need to be supporting creators who do it for passion. I’m not saying they shouldn’t make any money from it, I’m literally saying the opposite thing. They already do it for free, and we should donate to them more.

I think you missed the part where I said we need to support the creators who aren’t getting ad revenue with our donations.

Absolutely! That’s exactly why I said we should support those creators who are doing it for the passion of it with our donations.

At some point I think we just have to realize that the vast majority of content we’re accustomed to consuming via services like YouTube and Nebula is just not that valuable. If a creator has to know they’ll get ad revenue or subscription fee sharing and influence through social capital in order to post whatever they’ve filmed, then they simply aren’t very passionate about whatever they’ve made. Why should we be passionate about consuming it then?

By contrast, one great thing about something like Peertube is that since revenue isn’t guaranteed just for uploading passably entertaining junk, the creators who post their own stuff there are really honestly actually passionate and see value in what they made. They want to share it, even if they don’t get anything for doing it.

That kind of creator is so much more worth us gracing with our eyeballs and our donation support than whatever anyone still posting solely on YouTube or some other corpo platform is shitting out.

We also get the huge benefit of Peertube being highly distributed, so the privacy is exponentially better by default.

Edit: Sorry, you asked about Nebula and I just soapboxed about stuff that isn’t Nebula. I paid for Nebula for a while, and it was okay. It had less available content than even Peertube does though, and as others have pointed out, it’s still a corporate service with all the privacy caveats that involves.

Eh, let’s not be ageist about this. Ignorant and corrupt legislation isn’t caused by the elderly, it’s caused by ignorance and corruption, which are not exclusive traits of elderly people.

As a person who was sexually abused as a child, please have the courage to state your opinions without using abused kids as a logical crutch.

CoMaps uses OpenStreetMap data, which is populated by the public, so you can fix your problem easily yourself by submitting the data you need that’s missing.

You can do this right from inside CoMaps, but also StreetComplete is another great app option for doing so.

I’ve done this for missing stuff in my area, my edits got verified and accepted very quickly. It’s much nicer than waiting for Google to maybe update their shit when it’s wrong.

When your family member’s privacy is compromised, so is yours.

I say, keep talking about it until it gets fixed. Reporting it once in 2023 and then never again just enables sweeping things under the rug.

Data breaches should always be news, even if it is unsurprising to you personally. There’s literally always going to be someone out there who doesn’t have the same information that you do.

Edit: yes, I do think it ought to be considered a data breach when data is shared with additional parties, even (or maybe especially) when that party is the government.

Technology is not the problem, it is a tool. As with any other tool, it can be misused; that doesn’t make the tool the source of the problem. There is nothing inherent about technology that means it must be used for evil.

The real problem is how capitalist industry uses that tool, and every other tool at their disposal, to exploit and discard humans, and the collateral social and environmental damage wrought by that system.

Capitalism is the nefarious problem with technology, not the technology itself.

He doesn’t have to be incorrect in order for people to feel betrayed by his comments. The commenter was answering the question of why people felt betrayed. Demonstrating the incorrectness of the CEO’s take is out of scope.

(Although, he definitely is also incorrect. Republicans love corporations and monopolies even more than Democrats do. They’re slightly more nationalistic about it though, which is the only reason they ever make noises to oppose corporations that aren’t sufficiently US-owned.)

Why are there so many responses like this, saying not to go back to Google? The OP didn’t even mention Google as an option they were considering. I’ve seen zero discussion in any of the other posts around the fediverse where people have expressed any desire to use Google because of this. Why would anyone think that users who had already moved to Proton would find Google acceptable as an alternative right now?

This just feels like you’re trying to discourage actual conversation about alternatives by acting like the only options are Proton or Google, so we all ought to shut up and sit down.

Also, if you think merely becoming a non-profit means a corporation can never exploit people and isn’t interested in making money off of it’s customers, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Yeah I realize they are trolling, and my reply isn’t for them. Displaying solidarity for my uterus-having comrades.

since you decided

So glad to hear that you are supportive of people’s autonomy to make decisions, that’s an important value to have. Since you support them making a decision to take action that could result in beginning a pregnancy, you’ll also support that autonomy when they make another decision later to end a pregnancy. Isn’t it great when we have ethical consistency in our views? Congratulations!

Yeah! How dare people object to the symbols of their ideology being coopted by the very forces their ideology opposes. Do you hear yourself? 🙄

I dunno, Mozilla developers have had 10 releases in the past 4 months alone, with many bug fixes in every release, and 3 of those releases being minor versions each containing multiple new features. I certainly consider bug fixes and new features to be improvements happening to the browser.

Internet Archive to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20240923091701/https://peabee.substack.com/p/whats-inside-the-qr-code-menu-at

Edit: oops, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org beat me to it!

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

Next up: Discord!

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?