Zedstrian

The ‘unthinkable’ of installing an adblocker or using a frontend?

simplify Reddit and improve Home feed personalization

AKA collect more data for advertisers.

Not unexpected given how inactive it’s been, but still unfortunate.

Any form of age verification is a violation of user privacy.

Every APK installation from outside of the Play Store gives an installation warning. It’s unnecessary and deliberately trying to make such installations seem less secure in comparison.

A beneficial warning would highlight the many privacy risks in installing apps from the Play Store instead of privacy-respecting alternatives from F-Droid.

The APK installation process is already more inconvenient than it should be, and now it will be getting even worse. There should be no difference in installing an APK via Google Play versus any other method.

The fact that the process will still have a ‘security’ warning each and every time after the 24 hour wait period shows that even for “advanced users” they want to make it as inconvenient as possible while claiming to still be keeping Android open.

People should be switching to Mastodon with how clear the coming enshittification is. User data is valuable, and the way ATProto siloes data from multiple platforms using the protocol encourages them to entrench the dominance of the official Bluesky PDS to maximize data collection. With $100 million in venture capital, Bluesky is in no way incentivized to meaningfully decentralize its platform.

Before subscriptions or advertising turn it into just another Twitter clone, users should be migrating to Mastodon.

Making users wait 24 hours doesn’t improve security; it’s an anti-competitive change designed to make the Google Play store seem like less of a hassle in comparison.

When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

Reddit and Twitter are filled to the brim with spambots and remain successful. The lack of distinction between real and fake content serves to attract marketers and propagandists to such platforms, with most users remaining due to the network effect. With its venture capitalist funding, Digg would be just as willing to benefit from spam if it held market dominance, and thus only distributed Fediverse platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon are viable solutions.

Penalties that are lower than profits encourage companies to rob consumers again in the future.

Because it’s still officially called the Department of Defense; only Congress can rename it.

More broadly, it illustrates the administration’s use of illegal boat strikes and regime change as foreign policy tools.

Windows Central shouldn’t be parroting the U.S. government in mislabeling the Department of Defense.

Agreed; Discord is trying to lull people into a false sense of security as a means of convincing them to stay, in the same manner that Reddit gave limited API access to apps like RedReader to stem the tide of users leaving for platforms like Lemmy.

Beyond age verification, if Discord is scanning a user’s messaging history to determine what their age is, one can only imagine all the other data valuable to data brokers that they are extracting from it too.

“Too late” isn’t even relevant anyway, they’re still doing it, so everyone should still be leaving.

There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.

That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.

While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn’t as useful for bypassing paywalls.