Yeah good points there, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply ads were historically better on the whole. Ads from a a century ago also featured a significantly greater amount of flat out lying about their products, especially when it came to medicines and “tonics”.

But even if we accept that their honesty has improved (dubious) I do think advertising today has become more intrusive, and the function of advertising is today is more about disrupting our focus than it ever has been.

100% agree

Great! I appreciate the response. There is an app called Zerocam that removes a ton of the algorithmic processing and the results look great, but they have a subscription model now 🤮 I would love a FOSS replacement.

Well said all around. I’ve had almost the exact same thoughts. Good TED talk.

This may be a hot take here but I do not actually hate the concept of “paying money to promote a product or service”. However, in practice I can hardly think of an advertising method that I find tolerable in the slightest due to the manipulation tactics. When you look at vintage photos advertising is usually some hand painted sign on the side of a bus stop that says “Try Zuckerman’s Flour!” I don’t hate that, but we also don’t have that.

This was actually extremely helpful, thanks for sharing. What device are you using? Is the camera app as good as Google’s? Also I’m curious if you were able to get tap to pay working.

Doesn’t feel like a Discord replacement.

I think it’s on the way there, but it’ll be a while on the order of years. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to self-host either.

so much better

It was about a year ago so maybe it’s improved since then. One specific hiccup I recall with Mint that I didn’t have with Bazzite was getting acceleration in a browser. I’m certainly not recommending Nvidia users avoid Mint!

Yes a little bit if you have an Nvidia card, and Bazzite has the option to boot right into a Steam Deck like interface which is great for controller gamers.

To be clear Mint is a totally fine choice too, but for gaming and especially for a total Linux newbie Bazzite is the choice.

Bazzite 100%. It’s the best out of the box gaming distro, and bonus points for immutability (not that your friend needs to know what that is).

deltachat will leak metadata everywhere

Got a citation for that? Genuinely curious

From ArsTechnica:

According to DuckDuckGo, chats on the service are anonymized, with metadata and IP address removed to prevent tracing back to individuals. The company states that chats are not used for AI model training, citing its privacy policy and terms of use.

“We have agreements in place with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the providers within 30 days,” says DuckDuckGo, “and that none of the chats made on our platform can be used to train or improve the models.”

So there is some trust involved, but I’m inclined to believe DDG.

Not a mod but from what you’ve said it sounds like your post was satirical, which violates the “on topic” rule.

For what it’s worth, THIS thread violates that rule too.

The topic of this post is that a company is charging money for altering what was previously not a restricted feature. That violates the third rule in the sidebar.

I agree OP has a right to be upset, but this post has nothing to do with privacy.

There’s no need to get upset. If you truly are having difficulty understanding my feelings on the topic and are asking in good faith, I’ll explain it one more time:

The topic of this post is that a company is charging money for it’s services. That violates the third rule in the sidebar.

Whatever mine or your feelings on the topic, it has nothing to do with privacy.

It’s empty venting, and the topic is not about privacy in a meaningful capacity, it’s about a business model.

Allowing venting/drama/gossip threads in a community over time will push out the people (like myself) who care about the actual community topic. And when those people are gone what’s left is a cesspit.

Hey mods just saying… I think a lot of us would appreciate having a rule against offtopic posts.

There is with Reddit! If you browse enough old posts you’ll inevitably come across a profile who’s history entirely consists of “I’ve quit and gone to Lemmy”.

Instagram - posts can still be checked in a browser without logging in. Imginn exists too if you want to browse a profile.

Facebook - Anecdotal, but I have not had a Facebook account in 20 years and I can safely say I’ve never once had FOMO or trouble finding information on an event. If it’s a private social gathering that’s worth going to, someone will invite me.