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Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

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Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#91

Post by chrisco255 »

thebladerunner wrote: post #69
mastazi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Instagram and Facebook. My life has never been better. Minor inconvenience does not outweigh major improvements in my mental wellness. (Edit: I mention mental wellness because those products, and the ads they carry, are designed to be addictive.)

Are you saying that not using Google search has improved your quality of life?

Are you implying that Google search is any longer the only quality search engine? Honestly, I've been using DDG for years now and only less than 1% of my searches do I ever jump over to Google for.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#93

Post by burnte »

mastazi wrote: post #58
marcinzm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them. So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all? >You can't change how they operate. Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.

I quit Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Instagram and Facebook. My life has never been better. Minor inconvenience does not outweigh major improvements in my mental wellness. (Edit: I mention mental wellness because those products, and the ads they carry, are designed to be addictive.)

So let me ask you a question, how were they negatively impacting your mental wellbeing? I ask this genuinely, because I have a tendency to feel these tools only negatively impact people who use them in stress-creating ways. That, however, feels like victim blaming. There's a difference between a using a circular saw dangerously and a circular saw that is MADE with electrical failures that shock you. Let me give the example of MY use so you can contrast it for me to help me understand.

I use GMail, Google Search, Youtube Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook.

I'm not thrilled about FB but it lets me keep tabs on friends. Sometiems I interact with a few people who are friends but sucked in by a lot of the disinformation around, so I try to engage with them sometimes but not often. I also spend maybe 15 minutes a day on it, tops.

Twitter never stresses me, I don't follow toxic people, just friends, entertainers, tech people and such. Again, maybe 15-30 minutes a day, tops.

I get a lot of satisfaction from Youtube, I even pay for premium so I don't get ads, and follow a bunch of great creators.

Amazon's pricing and delivery are great. that makes me happy. I just make sure not to by crap/scam products and I'm good. I use Amazon Music every day, and their video streaming is great too (although they need to stop changing the name).

Google Search is by far the best, IMO, and saves me hours every day.

I have my personal domain go to gmail, and it makes managing ages of email a breeze.

So I can't see a way in which ditching any of those would benefit me, and aside from Facebook, I feel NOT using them would cause me more stress, or less enjoyment.

I'd love to know how you find leaving them has benefitted you.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#94

Post by nexthash »

PostOnce wrote: post #80
nexthash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of data to other services, which takes time to research, backup, and transfer. And even then you can't fully get rid of them, because switching to Apple from Android costs money, and I am not willing to root Android. This is merely my personal situation, but sayi…

"massive dependence" Switching from gmail to another provider isn't like living without electricity, it takes a couple of days updating some external accounts to reflect your new email; I did it. Buying shit from somewhere that isn't Amazon isn't exactly trekking through the jungle for 3 weeks. All you have to do is type in another domain. There is no shortage of non-Amazon sellers with similar prices. Switching from…

I hope you understand that this is all relative... what if you were in a situation where all of your friends/news are on Facebook? Where you don't have time to update 30+ accounts/subscriptions to reflect a new email address? Paying $500+ for an iPhone? Depending on the person, that is a hell of a lot of effort. If it wasn't, FAANG wouldn't be the empire it is today. It would be taking million user hits like WhatsApp after a single scandal.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#95

Post by userbinator »

sova wrote: post #39
boomboomsubban wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame nobody saw this coming fourty years ago and devoted his life to the cause.

The infrastructure is run by private parties -- but since the advent of encryption it ought be possible to lay down some basic principles or precepts of the online denizen. "The Right to be Forgotten" is a strong step in the right direction, but anonymity sometimes makes people act rashly -- which reminds me of the need for Nettiquette. I believe the difficulty comes in guaranteeing backdoors for law-enforcement and…

"The Right to be Forgotten" is a strong step in the right direction

You mean "The Right to Rewrite History"?

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#96

Post by marcinzm »

na85 wrote: post #83
marcinzm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them. So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all? >You can't change how they operate. Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.

>lower the quality of my life Quitting Facebook will objectively increase your quality of life.

I use Facebook for my Etsy shop and finding funny FFXIV memes. Pretty much a ghost town of a feed beyond that. Both of which I feel increase my quality of life.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#97

Post by crumbshot »

marcinzm wrote: post #90
crumbshot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Search (including via DDG) DuckDuckGo doesn't use Google Search, so you'd be okay there.

It does if you do '!g' which most people do a lot as the Bing results are often crap.

No that just ends up redirecting your browser to google.com with the search query, it's equivalent to going there and typing it in yourself.

Which if you were to give up Google Search, is something you wouldn't be doing (or would have blocked).

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#98

Post by gonehome »

throwawayboise wrote: post #24

Opt out. No Google. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Amazon. You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them. You can't change how they operate. But you can change how you operate.

Amazon is great, Twitter can be great if you use it well, and the other two are pretty easy to drop.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#99

Post by COGlory »

nexthash wrote: post #63
throwawayboise wrote: post #24

Opt out. No Google. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Amazon. You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them. You can't change how they operate. But you can change how you operate.

Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of data to other services, which takes time to research, backup, and transfer. And even then you can't fully get rid of them, because switching to Apple from Android costs money, and I am not willing to root Android. This is merely my personal situation, but sayi…

I did it:

- LineageOS + MicroG and F-Droid for mobile.

- NextCloud (and DAV) running on an old laptop for calendar, contacts, and file storage. The mobile app uploads all my photos automatically. It backs up to Backblaze

-ProtonMail with a custom domain for email.

Amazon is pretty avoidable. Shipping has gotten faster and cheaper everywhere else at this point. At least for the rural place I am.

I'm not particularly tech savvy. This took a significant time effort for me. At this point, it's all pretty stable, I don't really have glitches anymore. I imagine the average HN user could easily replicate it, and if this type of setup got more popular, it would invariably get easier to set up.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#100

Post by int_19h »

shripadk wrote: post #21

I got banned here for saying this but I'll continue to say it nevertheless. We are already in the Censorship Era. This is an Orwellian Nightmare. The quicker this is brought under control the better. The last thing we need is Corporate Overlords controlling what we say or do online. This includes Hacker News as well.

The "Orwellian Nightmare" is 100% correct, but it's not about 1984. In 1943, Orwell wrote an essay, "Freedom of the Press", that was meant to be published as a preface for "Animal Farm". Ironically, the essay itself was censored in exactly the manner Orwell described, and would only be published in 1973. Here's bit that rings truer than ever:

"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

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