Reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdVziDruzyk

I suspect the large majority of people who use the Fediverse don’t want to be publicly trackable in this way. It would be fine for me if the people who did stayed on Facebook. To me, it’s not a goal that 100% (or any %) of Facebook users move to the Fediverse. What is important is just that the Fediverse has a critical mass of activity that it doesn’t completely die.

Also, maybe it’s just me (I’d be interested to hear what others think) but I think trying to track down old school or college friends is really something people only want to do for a few years. By the time I hit my mid 20s I didn’t really care anymore. There are people from school I sometimes think about and wonder where they are now, but ultimately, if I never tracked them down and they never tracked me down in the years since, the connection was clearly not that important.

Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

“A sale is a sale” works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else’s benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don’t really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

I use a lot of free and open source software, and some of the stuff I use a lot I support with donations. Python, Mozilla, FairEmail are examples of software I have donated to. Wikipedia also.

This is the publicly owned and funded NHS, not a business.

It’s possible there’s a regional or generational gap there. If you’re pushing 110 you probably haven’t worked in 40 years. You could even argue that the ones literally working themselves to death are the very ones paying for the older generation’s happy carefree lifestyle.

Proton and Tutanota are the most privacy-focused ones, offering zero-access encryption. The flipside is that they are a bit more expensive and less easy to use with third party email clients.

There are a number of alternatives like mailbox.org, Posteo and Fastmail which are cheaper, and less private than the above two but arguably still better for privacy than Gmail (in that their whole business model isn’t built off capturing and monetising your data).

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no complaints. I use it with third party clients like Thunderbird for desktop and FairEmail for Android so can’t speak to how good their web UI is.

I also strongly recommend getting your own domain name to use with your email. It means if you ever want to switch providers in future you won’t need to change your email address.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

They have since announced that it will be capped at 0.1% of a bank’s assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/09/business/italy-bank-windfall-tax-change/index.html

Nobody’s sending you to jail for using WhatsApp.

Link, because unbelievably this article about a website does not contain any link to the website: https://sanctions.nazk.gov.ua/en/art/

I feel like half of London could be listed here. Everyone knows about the American candy shops around Oxford St. I live in South London and every other shop is a vape shop or mobile phone accessory/repair shop. Not saying they are all fronts but they feel like it.

Google Maps is the last Google thing I rely really heavily on. I would love to be able to replace it with OSM but searching for places is far better on Google (admittedly, probably because they have more context for your search due to all the spying). I also rely a lot on Google reviews when I’m in a new place and just want to grab a coffee or a drink or something. Could probably use TripAdvisor for that though.

A lot of country- or city-specific subreddits either aren’t on here or are quite inactive. To be honest they were mostly cesspits on Reddit so maybe it’s no bad thing but you occasionally found useful information there.

Other than that, there were a few subreddits that were good for recipe ideas, like /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. /r/ZeroWaste was good too, on occasion.

In general, non-tech related communities don’t seem to have migrated over as much. Most of the subreddits I followed were related to technology in some way and now have pretty active communities on Lemmy.