Have you also tried using Signal instead of WhatsApp? Sorry, had to do it.

That’s a glowing recommendation of Signal. And a good reminder to donate. I’m doing it right now.

This would essentially require you to not communicate outside of Signal.

Celebrity/billionaire worship. Just no. It means their values are wildly erratic.

Don’t threaten us with a good time!

Right. This goes for every company, ever. No company is going to do what they should do if it’s not profitable or beneficial to them in some way. It makes sense if you think about it, but that’s also why regulation exists. So that they don’t become too unhinged.

So when the existential threat is made public, it’ll already be in the palm of his hand. Wonderful.

Originally I thought I could, but no. Because when I listen to the music, I’m giving that artist money, attention, and power.

That results in giving them a bigger platform to spew their bigoted opinions/actions is counterintuitive to my goals. I would rather not.

No Big Tech company has your best interests in mind. Ever.

Reminder: this is the company that holds a monopoly on the internet and dictates web standards.

I need to understand why people still keep giving that man money. Willingly. It’s mind boggling.

I’ve bought every single generation of an Apple Watch, and I returned it every time.

I wanted to love it so much, but I couldn’t.

It’s just a glorified notification system.

Anytime I got a notification on it, or wanted to use it for something, it was faster and far more convenient to just pull out my phone and do whatever I needed to.

The only thing I found it good for was controlling music from a distance, but that’s not an important use case for me and definitely not worth the price tag, plus the recurring data plan. It’s a money and attention hog, just like any other smartphone.

Serious question: why does everyone in silicon valley have a god complex?

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Fuck Google. Ruining the internet for profit.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

I couldn’t agree more. We shouldn’t need to be somewhere else to receive announcements (especially such important ones).

Not to mention Discord’s horrible record of privacy and security. I don’t have an account and will never make one, and I’m sure many others in the fediverse will agree.

I actually just tested out the account making process, and I got asked for my phone number. No. Way.

We’re here because we care about a decentralized, open network. Aside from its confusing and busy UX, it’s not even indexable. Discord is literally a black hole for information and terrible for everyone except for Discord itself, who is doing who knows what with all of our data.

Discord is everything the fediverse stands against.

Wait, what? A shitty Google product? Plagued by ads and spyware? No way!

As others have pointed out here, use Aurora Store or F-Droid.

I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It’s just that they don’t always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there’s virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we’d never tolerate in real life.

If you could visually see every time there’s a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we’d be in a better position.

There’s no way we’d tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.

It’s usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn’t as “visual” and as “graphic” as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.

Burn it all down