This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Google is a fucking monopoly. (Please do not use any Google product. If you care about freedom, there are tons of alternatives for most products.)
Start with:
switch to DuckDuckGo search or Brave Search
switch to Firefox on your phone and use uBlock Origin (not the weak lite version, but the full Origin version)
Good job you've done 80% of the work. You can continue to de-Google
btw
Don't use brave it's still chromium/ pays Google
And yet it has some of the best fingerprint randomization techniques. Down to some insane details. And before you say, just use the Tor browser for that... I do. But that is a different type of resistance, uniformity. Which is great for some use cases, but randomization also works even better in other situations... Eg, personalized browsers with a few extra extensions and customizations.
I use Firefox bro 🦊
Waterfox ftw.
Honestly Firefox is fine for now until they add their AI shit
Nice
I switched to Vivaldi and Ecosia, barely notice a difference.
Ecosia is OK, but if you use Vivaldi (I'm guessing it's Chromium) you will give power to Google. If we want to fight Google, there are three main areas.
1 - The most important is search (fortunately they suck and it's easy to change).
2 - The second most important is Chromium (there is only one alternative, Firefox - I don't count Safari because it's for Apple devices). Firefox has Manifest V2; if we lose this, we lose great power.
3 - The third most important is YouTube. I think this is the hardest one because maintaining a video-sharing platform is very expensive, and it's not something that can live just with donations.
YouTube has to be replaced with a decentralized torrent-like based system where every user shares the load with what they are watching.
this could be great for popular content
It would be a great solution for most media only because computers are so fast and have excellent connections nowadays. I think if everyone just hosts their own content through a system like this we can preserve even niche content.
Obviously there would be some serious technical hurdles such as search. It wouldn't be a magic bullet, but a good compromise to the top-down Monopoly we have now.
This is very good idea but we'd need domains for that
Vivaldi also kept Manifest V2, so old extensions do keep working there. They also have a mastodon server, and email/calendar/feeds, so they offer more out of the box than Firefox. Lots of projects built on other open source projects like Chromium and KDE do offer legitimate alternatives.
For #3, how much would it actually cost to host a medium sized YouTube channel on peertube? I top off my prepaid hosting costs every few years to cover my website's remarkably high traffic (just me and a few other people :P). Consequently I have no idea how much it would cost to self host a site with actual visitors and video content.
I guess too much because think like you have 1000 videos each video is ~500 mb (also you'll need to store 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p versions) let's say 1 GB storage for each video, total storage need: 1TB just for one channel it's ok but there would be like 10k channel at least
1 TB * 10000 = 20 TB * 500 = 500 hard disk with 20 TB
let's say each one is $350 total $175,000 (and this is hard disk I thing you're not going to use hard disks)
(and this is just storage I don't know about traffic costs)
You are probably right that low quality clickbait, or ultra long-form content couldn't survive under that model. Also, the recodes and regional hosting for sites with a global reach adds cost.
With that said, I wonder if the economics work out better for a group of people who share an interest and want to cultivate a community around it. All 10k channels don't need to go on one server. For me, I think being decentralized is a key part of the benefit. I see the folks on urbanists.video doing the peertube thing very well. I talked to them a while back because I couldn't find a way to pitch in for server costs and it sounded like they were self-funding while they figured out their open collective. We're limited on what we can learn from them because the viewcounts aren't in YouTube's ballpark and the creators post both places and probably owe a lot of their exposure to the YouTube algorithm rather than Peertube. Nevertheless, the Urbanism folks have sown the seeds to get out from under YouTube's thumb and Google themselves will water that seed by enshittifying their own product. I'm curious to see it continue to develop.
Does anyone around here run a Peertube?
The real cost of a centralized platform like YouTube also includes giving up the freedom of communities to set their own standards, and while it isn't a monetary cost, I think it's worth careful consideration.
It could be a good thing to have an internet with less slop and more high quality content produced by people and for people. How we decide that will likely be contentious. I'm sure there's some very rich people out there who would be thrilled if poor people couldn't afford to be heard outside their own communities.
Not everything is worth the disk space it's saved on (and 3 backups of course). YouTube has become increasingly filled with such content. That AI generated listical video of the 10 best ways to painlessly pluck nose hairs probably won't make the cut. If users have some skin in the game, if it feels like their space and their communities again, perhaps things will improve.
Some sort of torrent tube that let's you seed what you star react could be a useful way of giving videos wider reach as they gain popularity within an organic community. Upvotes would mean something if every upvote stored a 1MB video fragment on your device for seeding.
My main problem now is that Google has a monopoly on the Android app store. Plus, most banking apps use play services, so good luck using your own phone ROM.
My bank has a mobile site that is more functional than their app. I guess that's not the case for every bank.
do they expect from me to throw my phone away becuase it's old? hardware is working great >5 years but they limit the software and of course I will pass that limit
it's not that hard to do if a company don't accept/respect your choice then you shouldn't accept them
edit: typo
I use a custom ROM (idk if this is the right word). I don't have Google Services or any Google apps. My previous banking app didn't accept custom ROMs, so I just canceled that and switched to one that does accept them. Now my banking app works great and I have no problems on my phone.
the only thing I can't replace yet is Maps. reviews, photos, in-trip driving instructions, it's just so full-featured I can't imagine myself without it
I haven't used Google Maps for four months. OpenStreetMap has been enough for me. I don't need reviews, photos, or driving instructions. Also, the constant use of navigation apps is atrophying our mental mapping skills.
OSM from F-Droid is the way, but there are a lot of apps now based on OSM data that are also very good like organic maps. It can be hard to switch over metadata, and you might lose some of the conveniences, but it's manageable or even better for some uses like hiking.
actually I'm using CoMaps (an OrganicMaps fork I switched because OrganicMaps had some bad decisions e.g:promoting KAYAK links)
I hope Europe makes their own App Store and sells cool flip phones like they have in Japan.
Sell it to us too.
Kindly, An American wanting to starve the corrupt beast of my government.
Has anyone here actually tried the app? The first (and thankfully last) time I tried it, it was full of nazis and actual CSAM. Maybe too censorship resistant for its own good??
Yeah I haven't seen any of what you saw.
Tbh until today I had zero idea if was Palestinian
They still haven't removed twitter for the AI generated child porn.
Ditch Google Play !
You can use Obtainium and F-Droid to install apps as directly from the Developer as possible.
You can use Aurora Store to get things from the App Store anonymously.
If you want, you can install /e/os (any phone) or GrapheneOS (Pixels only) to de-google your Android as much as possible !
F-Droid (main repo + izzy's repo) is enough for 70-80% of app needs and their quality is very good (in play store there is millions app but most off them is scam and trash)
EU, what about Google monopolies??
Reminder that Google is on it's third attempt to prevent or limit the installation of APKs outside of the Play Store, meaning they are near the point they can effectively control what apps people run.
This was the real reason for me to ditch the whole Google
I may compromise privacy
but I'd die for FREEDOM
Anyone who cares about freedom should install Graphene OS now.
Clickbait? The developer is Palestinian/Australian, the app’s audience is global, and it’s not just Palestine-specific. So what’s up with the sensationalised title?
If anything the app is Australian, Australian made, the developers are in Australia.. this is clickbait
It's an app developed by a Palestinian which got popular because of recent increasing censorship on TikTok and Instagram against Palestine.
