I was going to block them and lemmygrad at first but decided not to and instead tried to understand what all these people were about.

Now I'm a communist, have a hammer and sickle, live in China, and my favorite color is red. Death to America comrades! Get fucked libs /s

Seriously though, they're not anymore insane than us. Maybe just a bunch of drunken commies at a bar who don't really bother to distance themselves from the subjects of a century of red scare propaganda. In any case, it's worth keeping an open mind and engaging in good faith.

Though as leftist as I personally am and have become in time, I'm not going to call anyone comrade or start using hammer and sickle imagery except in the context of history lol. Libs can still get fucked though.

What about Google Play Services? A pre-installed Swiss army knife of a system app with proprietary code and apps relying on it as a dependency seems to check the box.

I'm only on the fediverse but I miss algorithms. Recommended accounts (which to be fair exists on a corner of Mastodon), similar accounts to one you just followed, custom home feed, suggested posts, etc. Discoverability sucks on fedi and the lack of interest from devs for some sort of private FOSS implementation is disappointing.

Loops was like let's have a "For You" algo early this year but even that seems to be a dead idea.

It's fine, I think. It might help get people on board with considering alternatives to enshittified things in general and see that a better internet exists outside of the corporate bubble.

Edit: nevermind I typed a lot but that Lemmygrad user made a far better post that I agree with.

I don't think you're aware of how independent audits, open source, good cryptography, a non-profit, government data subpoenas, and a lack of data collection works. That is what I have faith in. If you're this concerned over someone having just your phone number, call your phone carrier, cancel your plan, and destroy your SIM card because whatever you're paranoid about happening to your phone number is already being done by countless entities that are not Signal.

There is no metadata harvesting on Signal and the use of a phone number is so convenient and helped massively with adoption from the general unaware public.

I loved that it acted as a private and secure drop in replacement for SMS (particularly before they removed that integration) that does what I needed and does it very well and easily connects me with people that already have my number. This made sharing Signal very easy. The only data Signal has to even provide to the authorities is your registration date, phone number, and time of last connection. The absolute minimum. It's fantastic. If you compare this to Whatsapp which has everything but the exact content of your messages, it's not even a contest.

For myself on Signal and everyone else I've known that that uses Whatsapp or Insta or whatever, the extra absolute anonymity of also removing phone numbers from the already small equation just isn't needed or worth it, otherwise you wouldn't be using Signal, let alone fucking Facebook.

Heh

Well it was the factory default but I got infected with some malware for a while that lead to data corruption. Eventually I found gender on a random disk in a format I'd never heard of but it worked out so I began searching for pirated copies to try out but I quickly found out that it was all incompatible with my installed proprietary drivers which resulted in a kernel panic. That eventually lead to a big system update which removed strict incompatibilities and malware, and gave me a feature to automatically hotswap gender as needed but at this point I'm sort of writing my own gender to ensure maximum compatibility with the overall system, including my updated antimalware database. It's not ready for full production yet but it's a work in progress and Rome wasn't built in a day. Plus no more kernel panic and god damn does my gender belong in c/unixporn.

She's attractive and cat ears are hot though... expression of attraction is not sexist, it's human. Honestly I'm jealous of her. This thread isn't being disrespectful either. I've seen plenty of thirsting for cock too so don't worry we're all about equality on leftist Lemmy.

I suspect it has to do with Microsoft wanting to lock down PC hardware (again) in a similar fashion as mobile hardware to their own benefit so they're being aggressive with trying to get that ball rolling by forcing people to do it their way, both with hardware (TPM, secure boot, higher system spec requirements for AI) and with software (forcing a Microsoft account over a local account, default encrypting the system and uploading the keys, etc).

They've probably calculated this move and are prepared to lose a chunk of their users to Linux.

At least it's easy to sideload install apps from non-proprietary repositories in Android

Yeah I know, doesn't roll off the tongue as easy, but does it really have to anyway? There's nothing "side" about F-Droid and nothing "main" about Google Play or Apple's app store. I'm sure these corps would love that to be the case which is why they keep using that term in that way. It's language/culture manipulation at its finest, along with "googling" something. It's a pet peeve of mine.

Capitalism baby. Gotta cannibalize, monopolize, and enshittifize for maximum profits.

giggles in F-Droid

Make no mistake, Google and Samsung are becoming increasingly hostile to installing apps from outside of their proprietary stores (I refuse to use the "sideloading" framing these corps like to use like it's some foreign scary thing outside of the safety of their walled gardens). Further obfuscation of settings, multiple warnings about security, and hijacking updates for apps installed from other repositories. I don't want to give them time to kill it like they keep trying with adblocking.

Both Apple and Google should be attacked for these things. But while we're at it, they should really address Google Play Services, Google's permanent, privileged, pre-installed presence on Android that will break things including notifications if you attempt to get rid of it. I really, REALLY want to be rid of that and Google Play, the last Google applications I have installed.

You beat me to it

So they can hear me type p + enter into my browser?

It hurts to think about the timelines that could have been.

Don't know the exact source but that's Astolfo. Have fun :3

I wish you could slap a custom rom on whatever phone you want and it Just Works™ like you can slap linux on any PC, but instead we get apps that potentially don't work, locked bootloaders, push notifications tied to Google Play Services, and whatever else. You can put Lineage on the EU version of my phone but not the US version because fuck you. I hate how corpo centric phones have become. Like Google shouldn't be allowed to hijack my entire screen for an ad or an app update. The entire modern definition of "sideloading" is BS, apps have access by default to things that they really don't need, and why do I need to use ADB to purge your pre-installed bloatware ffs

Not cool.

The students aren't the brain broken ones here.