It’s hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:

• Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
• Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF’s ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
• The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
• The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
• She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
• Signal doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
• Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports

That’s it, that’s the whole story. That’s the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.

I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.

pay for it with advertising your data

FTFY.

That part is not allowed according to the GDPR afaik, the decision about your personal data cannot be artificially linked to something else. They can absolutely show ads, but without using your data.

From what I understand the GDPR says you have to give users a real choice about the usage of their data, without any unreasonable negative repercussions. Having to pay money (at least as much as they are asking for) is such an unacceptable repercussion, no matter how FB might phrase it.

They are allowed to take money or show ads for access, but they can’t couple that decision with the one about the user’s data usage.

The video is probably factually correct, but very disingenuous with its interpretations and conclusions imo.

Of course Mozilla and Firefox have their own share of problems and bad decisions, and they are pretty well known and talked about from what I’ve seen, but equating it to Google and Chrome is just pure cynicism. Mozilla having to earn money somehow (1% donations!) and Google trying to maximize profits at all costs is not the same thing, even if it might look similar sometimes.

Clickbait headline. The underlying article lists much more reasonable restrictions:

• Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions
• Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions
• Anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers will be prohibited

So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.

They also released a Fossify messenger and contacts app. You might have to enable or refresh the IzzyOnDroid repo to see them now, or wait until they come to the default F-Droid repo.

I’ve been removing Google services from my life bit by bit over the past year, and I have to say it is crazy how hard it actually is! They have inserted themselves into so many digital workflows, securing monopoly positions and preventing the rise of competitors and open ecosystems. In many areas the only alternatives are other tech giants, or accepting feature downgrades and having to set things up manually.

I’m really glad that the browser is one area where the transition is actually very simple and straightforward!

I can flip them back and forth at will, I think I finally found my super power!

The main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is pretty bland and mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a phenomenal game! The companion arcs, acting and overall presentation are still next level, some sidestories are very good, and it’s great how faithfully they adapted the D&D rules. But the main story …

Anakin Skywalker agrees: A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler, we just had unusually bad luck with those in the past!

What you’re talking about is being allowed to use something or being tolerated, that’s different from having a right. A temporary right is a real right for a specified time frame, but here it would just be “until I decide you don’t”.

No it’s not, they changed it back in april.

Arr-men to that!

I removed the comment (maybe still visible on some instances?) because what I was criticizing in it wasn’t necessarily said in the one it was answering, but I do still think the comparison is adequate!

There is no reason for digital content to ever go bad, other than not having any compatible physical devices anymore. Idk what you base your “reasonable expectation” on, but properly stored digital content does not degrade, so it could last basically forever. I guess you just extrapolate from what you’re used to from these platforms, and I’m sorry to tell you that they’ve been ripping you off the whole time. There is no physical reason why they couldn’t keep the digital content available, at least until they go out of business, and without DRM even well beyond that. Hosting static data is incredibly cheap, the limitations are all about contracts and profit maximization.

If anything, the house in the metaphor is actually not long-lived enough.

They increased it to 25mb afaik, that should be more than enough for the vast majority of use cases. But I don’t want to argue about the optimal limit, if you don’t want to use it because it’s not enough for you then that’s your decision. I’m not overly fond of Discord myself, or any centralized messenger for that matter, but I do think the way they handle files is all right.

We need to stop calling it digital “ownership”! You don’t get to own anything as a customer on these platforms, because rights that can be taken away on a whim are no rights at all.

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It’s not, those are bots and content copied from reddit. It doesn’t represent any real user engagement.

The mirroring content is targeted at specific communities.

It’s affecting the All feed of federated instances as well, and it affects everyone who might be interested in those topics.

The posts are useful by themselves.

If you can’t empathize with this then please just accept that it’s not just about the content inside the posts. The fact that a human decided to post it somewhere makes a difference, even without any further interactions. You could probably think of it as subtext or metadata, that changes how a post is perceived.

What I said is that if LW continues with the defederation even if it becomes populated with real people, then it will be on LW for keeping isolated.

You decided to create an instance filled with bots and then motivated new users to convert some into real accounts. You created the situation where other instances have to also block those users if they want to get rid of all the bots. This is purely on you! You can’t set a house on fire and then blame others for the water everywhere.

“Sacrificing alien.top” means stopping with the bots and just implement the migration on another instance.

Yea, so everyone who converted their account until then would be left on an instance filled with bots, and blocked for that by at least LW. Great job!

Droid-ify: Same functionality as F-Droid, same repos etc, but with a much nicer UI.

Xtra: Alternative client for Twitch with support for blocking ads.

LibreTube: Native Android client for the alternative YT frontend Piped.