• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2024

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  • Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.

    Brave did the affiliate link injection in 2020, but reversed and apologized shortly after. Similar to Mozilla’s Mr robot thing, it seems to be a one off fuck up that they reversed and apologised for.

    Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white. It’s certainly less dangerous for a minority to spread hateful rhetoric to a majority, but rasicm is still racism, which is bad.


  • As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1

    • Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
    • Both try to upsell you on services
    • Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
    • Both have made fringe political donations

    So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google’s monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.

    Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.

    I’m sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.

    Nobody’s going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.




  • There was already a wave of bots identified iirc. They were identified only because:

    1 the bots had random letters for usernames

    2 the bots did nothing but downvote, instantly downvoting every post by specific people who held specific opinions

    Turned into a flamware, by the time I learned about it I think the mods had deleted a lot of the discussion. But, like the big tech platforms, the plan for bots likely is going to be “oh crap, we have no idea how to solve this issue.” I don’t intend to did the admins, bots are just a pain in the ass to stop.




  • I don’t know if you can or not, although I can confirm you can use Google Maps in a web browser if you grant the google maps website location access, and it’s pretty one to one with the app I believe. It does require you burn through mobile data if you don’t have unlimited since you can’t download offline maps, but the web version has gotten me out of a jam when open source map apps fail and if you don’t worry about data it might be worth trying.


  • If you are looking for a generic phone with good privacy and usability I would highly recommend a Pixel with Graphene OS. If you’ve never flashed a phone before, you can install Graphene within a web browser and never need to do any of the more complicated flashing stuff like most other setups require. It also allows you to optionally install Sandboxed Google Play Services (on the main profile or isolated on a second one), letting you access normal apps while still having some of the privacy and performance benefits of an otherwise de-Googled phone.



  • Mastodon was around for a while, slowly being built up until 2022 when the big twitter surge happened. They had the perfect foundation to make it the next big thing and all they had to do was keep the people who joined, make it slightly easier to join, and develop a few features like quote posts.

    • They banned and defederated everyone who wasn’t in a very narrow sliver of political and technological opinions.

    Mastodon lost it’s momentum, but had a second shot a year or two later. Threads joined the network offering a massive user base that could talk with Mastodon users. Then Bluesky blew up and that was bridged so Mastodon could talk with those people too. Mastodon may not have been the center of things anymore, but it could be fully integrated into the other two.

    • Most servers defederated with threads and bridges.

    There are other things that I’m sure play a roll as well. Luck, discoverability, easiness to join, people getting board, people looking at the next shiny thing, you name it. But it does look to be in many ways self inflicted.


  • Been seeing that a fair bit too lately. Freetube, Grayjay, and Newpipe seem so sometimes get around it, even if the error is in the browser the video will sometimes load in those apps from the same IP. If you get lucky and find a working invidious/piped instance that might work too.

    Otherwise, turning on a VPN and switching between servers will usually eventually lead to a working one. That, and if you’re up for it, check to see if your favorite creators are on places like Peertube, Odysee, or Rumble that don’t block IPs like YouTube does.


  • Potentially, but in different ways. You could argue that mass defederation and hostility between communities are the beginning of a fediverse specific enshittification process. And instead of running out of money and then swamping platforms with ads, the big servers could run out of money or get a bored admin and instances could dissapear. Constantly dissapearing instances could also be a fediverse specific enshittification process.