I hate forced 2FA that you can’t disable anyway. I don’t want to waste time waiting for an insecure text, I don’t want to input an unencrypted code you sent to my email, I don’t want to click your damn notification that runs through Play Services, and no I’m not enrolling in passwordless auth. I don’t need to be babied into securing my accounts. Any account I do actively and willingly secure is already using TOTP. Let me put in my username and password, then kindly fuck off.

I really hope this gets a proper foss “for you” algo. Personalized content and people discovery features are lacking on the fediverse.

An enshittified Lemmy alternative.

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.

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.

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.

Linux support

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

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

They should host a Mastodon server at .gov

Chinese company bytedance tries to fragilise western democracies episode 1937392

No, it’s standard corp level behavior that’s beholden to government censorship and propaganda when it doesn’t fit the narrative. You can substitute any big tech company in the US for Google. They all do this. It’s why the government is not a fan of TikTok, they don’t have that same level of control over the flow of information.

Ads with a chance of rain

So the evil mega corp gets a free pass while the Internet Archive regularly has to fight for open access to knowledge. Fuck that and fuck Meta.

Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more… human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It’s wild that covid babies won’t know what those days were like.

Microsoft is an abusive ex. It will keep abusing you because it knows no other way. You can waste your days trying to fight against it, trying to figure out how to disable and remove whatever new privacy invasive anti-consumer bloat Microsoft decides to roll out that Tuesday.

Or you can leave and switch to Linux and waste time there instead. Tux is all about that respect and is handsome to boot. He might be a bit sensitive and break down rarely so you might need to spare a few to make sure he’s ok, but it’s nothing a little love can’t handle. And he’s only going to get better and stronger as he grows. You might even look forward to receiving updates (wow, I know). A stark contrast from your abusive ex.

Ads have definitely added more load on electrical grids in aggregate than locally hosted and lightweight models, especially given that ads are fucking everywhere all the time. Websites, apps, the servers, even 24/7 electric billboards. I’m not worried about a few nerds using slightly more electricity sometimes for their own benefit and joy (it’s still less power than gaming), as opposed to a corp that burns through power and breaks their climate pledges (Microsoft) for the benefit of their bottom line and nothing else. Corps don’t get to have a monopoly on AI that was built with our data, only to have it fed back to us to pull more data and siphon more money.

So basically fuck Google and fuck ads.