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.

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.

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.

deleted by creator

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.

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

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.

Tab groups are in the works but we haven’t heard anything new about it since March.

Google sneezes and your future is stolen by an ad that’s selling it back to you. Google is too big to exist.

Typical megacorp cycle.

Step 1 introduce privacy invasive feature

Step 2 spend years getting all the data they need

Step 3 get a slap on the wrist for a fraction of what they made and will make from it

Step 4 profit and repeat

or do as they do in China and run a quick scan using their special software?

Can I get a source for this?

Saudis financed Muskrat’s takeover

Proton Wallet caught me off guard, especially since people have been asking for basic features forever. Questionable decision making. But I guess if I ever get interested in bitcoin or crypto in general for some reason, I trust Proton to make a good product that aligns with my principles. Upset they don’t support Monero though.

And I like the LLM proofreader. That’s just a genuinely useful feature to me.

I really hate the term “side-loading.” We shouldn’t need a word for the normal way we’ve been installing apps for the past 40 years. If tomorrow Apple decided they were going to start only letting you visit web pages they approved of, we wouldn’t call some sort of alternating system that let you see the rest of the fucking internet “side-paging”. We’d instead call the whole thing bullshit.

Source

Chinese company bytedance tries to fragilise western democracies episode 1937392

I never implied that you said they were the only problem, nor am I proving your point because you perceive me to be “triggered” by the critique that aspects of phones are contributing factors, which I also did not disagree with. I’m simply stating that there are much larger and central factors that are contributing to unhappiness such as political, social, and economic instability, and that people who focus on other people’s contrary reactions to the popular talking point that “phones are bad” are not having a discussion in good faith.