I started to read the below naively thinking apple was threatening to pull out of the EU to protect user privacy... Over chat control 🤣🤦♀️
A couple of sentences in and I was helped away from this idealist thinking and shown it was over their monopoly of software app store instead. The article then furnishes and incredible list of apple violating user privacy, especially at the behest of China, which butties this feeble lie in a mountain of their own making.
It also then follows up on the topic of calling their bluff that they obviously won't follow up on with "so what" everyone outside the us needs to get off us tech anyways it's long past time anyone with a straight face could claim it trust worthy.
@sillyCoelophysis I'm reminded of a quote from the movie "Sorry To Bother You":
“People will tolerate literally any atrocity or injustice, no matter how absurd, so long as they don’t perceive a meaningful avenue of personal resistance"
Which is to say if we assume Google isn't really any better as a company for your privacy (also look to them making it a requirement they sign (and approve you as a developer) of even third party apps to start to claw back third party publishing) then there aren't exactly a plethora of viable options for the average consumer. Most folks aren't ready to install grapheneos yet and also risk losing apps they need for life and work. So we're in a bad timeline at the moment :( and I don't have a great answer.
@dan_ballard@sillyCoelophysis this is why we always do these absurdly broken computer setups... somebody has to mark the trails for others to follow. if enough of us take the same path, maybe we can even pave it a bit.
@ireneista@sillyCoelophysis Haha so in part now I think it's also that I'm doing enough 'weird' and off path stuff for work and second work that I don't have many spoons left for "free time". To that end, as a this moment example, I'm still a volunteer at open privacy still working on Cwtch when I have spare time and it's a bit of a weird build bundling a Go library with a Flutter UI for 4 platforms including Android, which, had some new requirements. So after spending some hours wrangling that and some more getting our automation to do it, I wrote that up. So exactly as you said, when wandering down weird paths, still trying to post sign posts and maps in case anyone else wants to follow a now slightly troden path 💜
@ireneista@sillyCoelophysis i think my heuristic for what gets blogged is "did i have to google and collate information from multiple places to accomplish my goal?". If so, then sounds like light research so better publish the results to potentially save others time.
This is somewhat broken now tho that most search engines are degrading and I'm pretty sure my site barely gets indexed
with ~20 being like, parsing errors or it has off site links so it thinks it is a sketchy redirect, but overwhelmingly
121 crawled but not indexed
it just doesn't care or like it. Including my ancient but i thought well detailed guide to installing Gentoo on a GP2x.
which is my problem, if google's just gonna find my content too niche and not surface it, that is a discoverability problem. I could have a solution for someone but if they can't find it, does the tree make a sound etc etc
@dan_ballard@sillyCoelophysis so our personal bet (more than a hypothesis, less than a theory) is that web search is becoming obsolete in light of the infinite bullshit generator, but that doesn't mean discovery is going away. it'll just have to take a new form.
@dan_ballard@sillyCoelophysis we further believe that the counter to the pile of infinite bullshit is people's personal social bonds. not social media "follow" relations, not parasocial artist-and-fan things, but two-way friendships. knowledge, understanding of context, etc can flow through those bonds. of course, figuring out how is the hard part.
@dan_ballard@sillyCoelophysis we suspect this is going to end up basically just being "my favorite sites" lists on everyone's personal page, like in the early days of the web.
the reason those went away in the first place is that google profited from them (PageRank is based on citation analysis), which caused unsavory people to start paying for placement, which made it feel pointless. but now web search is faltering, so it makes sense again. we hope.
@ireneista@dan_ballard@sillyCoelophysis I do like to see the 88x31 button collections on some of my friend's sites, linking to their friends and so on in a little path to explore. Sometimes I'll just click around for a few minutes.
