are you 12? it seems you have no experience or memory of a world before 2012. everything which is currently being controlled by a handful of companies like Meta or Google today existed in huge volumes before these snakes paid their way into global dominance. i.e. there were hundreds of big community websites long before facebook. there were several great search engines before google. there were several streaming sites before youtube. there were tons of chat applications before Messenger/WhatsApp. there were thousands of email services before gmail, hotmail, and yahoo created their “whitelist”, etc etc. Heck, Messenger (and google talk, etc) - all used XMPP originally, but isolated their network when it grew big enough to kill competition and force users onto their platform. we all USED to be able to use whatever client we wanted and still keep in touch with family and friends. we all USED to be able to run our own mail servers. we all USED to…

fuck it. why am I putting effort into this lol.

these techs existed long before web based ad companies. but, ad companies exist, so obviously they will contribute to the technologies they need to continue to exist. to do otherwise would be corporate suicide and it’s a stupid argument to pretend like we wouldn’t be fine without them just because they are putting their fingers in the cake. nothing was wrong with the older browsers; modern browsers are essentially just a war of proprietary rendering to try and kill competition bringing us back to the era of fucking internet explorer; which no one sane would want.

heck, firefox came to exist from netscape, so its basically ancient history at this point, and chromium (blink) is a fork off webkit which in turn is a fork of khtml from KDE (linux) konqueror browser - and as a matter of fact, khtml was discontinued just last year. i don’t see the relevance of ad companies when things have been fine and still are; without them.

but as we continue to abandon the practice of IT and todays kids grow up thinking google created the internet and all they know is how to touch the rainbow icon on their screens, the future is fucked.

there were tons of video streaming sites around before youtube came around. i even ran one at the time.

the internet doesn’t run on ads. we were all fine before the megacorporations came in and started pushing ads down our throats for delivering the exact same services that already existed for free. it just so happens ads are more profitable, and with more profit, you have more ways to achieve exposure, which gives you more profit, ad infinitum.

point is, we’d be fine without ads.

steam on linux was officially launched because gaben said windows trying to build a walled garden can go fuck right off. and he was right on the mark; as microsoft keeps buying big studios and locking down their ecosystem more and more. steam going linux and the steam deck are direct responses to wrangle control out of microsofts hands - and with all rights, considering the debacle of directx when that launched and pushing gaming to make hardware development a priority which in turn made microsoft licenses sell for new computers.

well this sucks. i’m on my 4th LG TV because I can’t stand the quality from other brands; but when the choice is ads vs picture quality, i’ll take the inferior quality every single time. fuck ads.

i seem to remember something similar. and blocking advertisers seems like it should be common law but i guess chrome killing adblockers takes predesence.

yes. they’re “censoring” algorithms designed to create engagement=profit, which are causing massive harm to society. i don’t see anything wrong with it at all. and like you, i’m on the fediverse because there isn’t an algorithm, our exposure is curated by us, not by engagement-bot-5.

.se mirror still up and working. looks like it was just a DMCA on the main domains.

just like email.

well to be fair bitcoin is on point as a decentralized currency.

using cinnamon. and yeah base software is largely fine. but non-base productivity apps are largely built in electron. cinnamon even offers a webapp tool so in some cases i can at least avoid it.

people who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.

the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.

the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.

the only…

i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.

they charge $3 per month for 10GB of storage

bs. discord is absolute trash for anything but live chatting. it does nothing different from plain old irc with a bnc and bots. they just took irc and made it easy for stupid people to use and slapped voice comm on top; which also already existed. using it as an archive, broadcast and support system is like trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw. people just use discord because people use discord. just like people just use facebook because people use facebook.

if you want to manage a community, you should use discourse. it’s the most modern alternative. if you want a public chat, use any chat you want that supports public chat, the only difference between all of them is what level of privacy they provide.

There are currently a wave of people moving certain activities to Band of all fucking things (using it side by side with facebook due to facebook policies). It’s basically a shitty korean clone of facebook but slower and with less stability and even less features.

They could have picked ANY of the platforms actually designed for the intended purpose. But Band? It’s the OPPOSITE of useful.

People don’t make sense.

Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.

almost every hobby has moved to facebook and it’s the same damn thing. utterly useless for the purpose people try to use it for.

i don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people, but this is definitely one of the pinnacles.

what about the whole knowing who is who based on word pattern/habit, and connected content and/or opinion?

not at all. mint offers a bunch of features ‘exclusive’ to mint as an integration with their system. of course it’s all open source and you could install it on any other system. but the key important factor with mint is that everything ‘just works’ with a fresh install, no customization necessary - which is something that can’t be said about any other distro, including Ubuntu. it is the only distro i recommend for non-pc users as there is no chance they will brick it.

regardless, KDE is just a DE. you won’t get the same mint experience of course, since it isn’t officially supported (and indeed, only cinnamon offers the complete mint experience), but installing KDE on mint is easy enough if you insist on using it.