Gradually, the migration to new platforms will take place

I’m not sure that will (or should) happen. Mainstream social media has an awful lot of shit that wouldn’t exist (or wouldn’t exist in the same way) on federated social media. For things that are purely commercial (which is a lot) the effort is higher and the payoff is smaller in a federated system. There’s a lot of social media that thrives only because it’s fundamentally commercial. That segment would never embrace federated social media willingly.

Then of course there’s the trigger-reward cycle you talk about. People might know it’s unhealthy, but they still do it. Not having that as part of the user experience a big adjustment coming to federated social media.

Encrypted apps like Signal encrypt messages in a way that only you and the recipient can decrypt and read. Not even Signal can decrypt them. However it has always been the case that another person could look over your shoulder and read the messages you send, who you’re sending them to, and so on. Pretty obvious, right?

What the author and Signal are calling out here is that all major commercial OSes are now building in features that “look over your shoulder.” But it’s worse than that because they also record every other device sensor’s data.

Windows Recall is the easiest to understand. It is a tool build into windows (and enabled by default) that takes a screenshot a few times per second. This effectively capture a stream of everything you do while using windows; what you browse, who you chat with, the pron you watch, the games you play, where you travel, and who you travel with or near. If you use “private” message tools like Signal, they’ll be able to see who you are messaging and read the conversations, just as if they were looking over your shoulder, permanently.

They claim that for an AI agent to serve you well, it needs to know everything it can about you. They also make dubious claims that they’ll never use any of this against you, but they also acknowledge that they comply with court orders and government requests (to varying degrees). So… if you trust all of these companies and every government in the world, there’s nothing to worry about.

I do, and it’s probably the main reason I started self hosting.

Managing parents estate made me want to get my shit in order for my own kids in the event I die. There’s a good chance that if I die, my cell phone is gonna die with me. And commercial services from Apple, Google, banks, and other institutions are increasingly tied to a single cell phone as “identity.” If you try to login on a device with no session cookies, they treat it as hostile, and do all sorts of oddball stuff that almost always requires the cellphone to access. And if you don’t have that phone, it’s incredibly hard.

By self hosting, I can choose to make access to that most of that data much easier for my family if I die and my cellphone dies with me. I don’t expect them to continue self-hosting, but I do want them to have easy access to files so they can move them to some system they are comfortable with.

Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020

Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.

couldn’t get my small group of gamer friends to switch

The hardest part of any change right there.

I’ve had pangolin running for a while, doing tunneling to some self hosted resources, and I’m confused by this announcement and update. It seems like they’re suggesting to use an Android/iOS client to connect to Pangolin protected resources, which seems like a shitload more work and overhead than just using wireguard to do the same thing. Am i missing something here?

Agreed. Wrong word choice. And its an important, major correction. Not a small one. :-)

+100. People forget, or chose not to pay attention to the fact that Google sensor vault data was key evidence in convicting the January 6 insurrectionists (who were exonerated to become ICE). Surveillance capitalism doesn’t care which side you are on.

I’ve got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They’re awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.

Gonna need you to open the YouTube app on the iPad you left at your mom’s house a few weeks ago and tap “Yes, its me.”

We track it’s location, so we know it’s at your mom’s place a few states away, and yeah, we could send the notification to the phone that’s sitting right next to you (we track its location too) but that would be a little too easy on you. And lets face it, if we wanted this to be easy, we’d just let you use the Google Authenticator 2FA we had you set up a few years ago and skip all this nonsense. But that’s not how we roll.

Hugs n kisses, Google

Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.

There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.

I don’t… think I’m a bot?

Your comment reminded me of the Black Mirror episode - Hang the DJ. (if you haven’t seen it, it’s brilliant). Also, I don’t think I’m a bot pushing a Netflix agenda, but who can tell these days.