Sphere

The simple fact is that YouTube just isn’t good enough to pay the amount of money for that Google wants for it. Accordingly, if other ways to use it besides premium aren’t available, I’ll stop using it and recover some time in my day.

Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.

I always just turn DRM off and don’t subscribe to these things… Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.

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Speaking as a non-Meta user for the past several years, I just centre my interactions around people who use the various forms of social media (mostly open source and no FB / insta etc) …

If people fall out of touch because they don’t want to move away from Meta, they’re not people I want to spend my time talking to. A degree of stubbornness is required, but eventually I’ve found sufficient interactions are possible on more desirable platforms, and I don’t miss Meta at all, nor the people I left behind there.

Doesn’t the phrase “wrong ideas” worry you a bit? I don’t agree with everything Stallman says, but I think he has a right to say it, just the same as others have the right to say they don’t like it and think he’s a horrible pig or whatever. This is, of course, very different from acting on beliefs like his, which could certainly end up being harmful.

But when we as a society get to the point where we say an idea is wrong, it provokes the individual to act on the idea rather than talk about it. That’s why freedom of speech is so important. Let the idea air and argue with it in a civilised way, and these things will sort themselves out.

The alternative exists, but it costs money. Most big YouTuber accounts (at least the ones I’m subscribed to) post on either Nebula, Patreon or some platform like that. It would cost quite a lot to subscribe to them all, but still less than YouTube premium in my country. So in the worst case scenario where YouTube really blocks all ad free interfaces except paid use, that’s my answer. I don’t like it as I think a lot of the content is overpriced for what it is, but it’s better than having $$$ swallowed up by some mega corporation that is just interested in screwing authors and viewers over as much as possible.

Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce “integrity” that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn’t mean Google won’t keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.

Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.

I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.

Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn’t exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It’s completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don’t respect your privacy. Remember, there’s always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.

I think what’s likely to happen isn’t that we’ll see one replacement for YouTube, but a large number of niche and possibly subscription based or peer to peer sites that collectively end up offering everything of value that YouTube does/used to.

And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.

Handing it to LibreOffice or Abiword I guess. Or for cloud fans, Google Docs. I don’t think anyone is going to go without a word processor because of this.

Interesting for the alternative OS options - a device like this one would be great if there were some really good serviceable Linux distro for phones … And yes, I know they exist, but they’re not up to the level needed by most people for a daily driver. As for Android, it’s a nice idea to have a phone that lasts that long, but would it actually be reliable and fast enough to use for 8 years?

Sadly, no option to get this in Australia besides grey import, which is going to be pricey. I’m going to keep an eye on the way this line of phones goes in future, but for me at the moment there are too many unknowns and the price tag is too high.

I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:

• SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
• NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.

These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.