Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That’s getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I’m the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

That’s generally what you hear from people who have basic use cases and simply can’t fathom other people may want or need different things from their devices.

Which is fine, they don’t have to understand. If stock is good enough for them nowadays, more power to them.

What I’m sick of is the condescension. This bizarre thing where they somehow think a person wanting control over a device they paid for is worthy of derision or shame.

It’s like if someone who only checks their email on their laptop laughing at someone using a desktop for heavier work, for no real reason other than thinking using technology differently than themselves is silly.

That other comment is a perfect example, and indictive of this weird subculture in Android spaces that hates Google but seems to be drinking from the same user-hostile Kool aid.

Personally, I’m an odd case, in that I didn’t used to root or use custom ROMs at all until recent years. Basically since Android 10, simply to get around the needless roadblocks and restore the functions I want. I was fine with stock for a long time, until Google started becoming Apple.

Shit like this is why I can’t abide GrapheneOS or their cheerleaders.

It’s legitimately the same attitude as Google itself. This parental, condescending tone, acting as if wanting freedom to control their own devices is somehow irrational. Continuing to push this toxic idea that handcuffs are the only way to protect users. Like a sysadmin at a workplace, but without the justifiable reasons.

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

I tried thunder looking for exactly what you’re saying but it didn’t feel like rif with so many of the customization and settings that rif provided not being present. I don’t just want something that looks like rif, I want something that works like it.

That’s why I ultimately fell onto Summit. It is basically the one app I’ve found after trying them all that genuinely feels like rif, because it’s packed to the brim with customizations and settings, with a very responsive dev, and fits the rif aesthetic (though you can change it to be however you like). It scratched that rif itch and I haven’t touched another app since.

Maybe throttled unless it passes some kind of check for being “authentic” or something. Feels like that’s the general pattern with Google now.

Hell, maybe it was related to implementing this feature. You can get parallel downloads from the store now because they changed how downloads are queued or something.

It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

Having third party clients is not good for security.

If the first party provider told you this, you should always second guess them.

Moreover, providing an option that informed users can choose doesn’t hurt security. This idea the user can’t be trusted to use the appropriate type of messaging if provided options needs to die.

You have absolutely zero guarantees, with or without their policy on third party apps. You can not send sensitive information to someone else’s phone and tell yourself it couldn’t possibly have been intercepted, or that someone couldn’t get ahold of that phone, or that the person you’re sending it to won’t take a screenshot and save it to their cloud.

A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It’s really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won’t be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.

Moreover, this policy does not exclude them from including third-party functionality and warning the user when they are communicating with somebody that isn’t using encryption.

Too many of these apps and services are getting away with the “security” excuse for what is effectively just creating a walled garden to lock users in. Ask yourself how you can get your own data out of these services when you decide to quit them, and it becomes more apparent what they’re doing.

Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.

Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.

I’d 100% donate to them if they accepted donations.

If they accepted donations, you wouldn’t want to.

The reason uBlock Origins surpasses all the others is because of who the lead dev is, what they believe, and why they do it. They are absolute hardline and believe in what they made. It’s not a job.

You don’t need to be that kind of person to be a good developer, but when it comes to something like an adblocker and privacy protection, you want people like him who won’t falter or sell out. You want those true believers.

If he accepted donations, then he wouldn’t be the kind of person that made uBlock Origins what it is.

You’re lying, because uBlock Origins refuses donations. They are adamant about the purity of the project.

This is more or less how it worked on Reddit. The admins handled vote spam or abuse, there was absolutely no expectation for moderators to have that information because the admins were dealing with the abuse cases. Moderators only concerned themselves with content and comments, the voting was the heart of how the whole thing works, and therefore only admins could see and affect them. Least privilege, basically.

I think a side effect of this, though, is that it increases the responsibility on admins to only federate with instances that have active and cooperative admins. It increases their responsibilities and demands active monitoring, which isn’t a bad thing, but I worry about how the instances that federates openly by default will continue to operate.

If you have to trust the admins, how do you handle new admins, or increasingly absent ones? What if their standards for what constitutes “harassment” don’t match yours? Does the whole instances get defederated? What if it’s a large instance, where communities will be cut off?

I don’t ask any of this as a way to put down this effort because I very, very much want to see this change, but there’s gonna be hurtles that have to be overcome

Ultimately I think the best solution would need assistance from the devs but I’m lieu of that, we have to make due.

Sure, but by the same token, mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes.

On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other). But they still had the foresight not to let moderators or users see those votes.

Complete anonymity across the board won’t work but they’re definitely needs to be something better than it is now.

That just feels like shooting themselves in the foot. Just inform the user SMS isn’t secure. That’s it.

Not being willing to trust the user with the information so they can make a choice is asinine. It’s the same reason why I stopped using Tuta. Complete privacy and security are great but if there’s no option to make things a little more open for the sake of convenience or interconnectivity, I’m just not interested.

Security and privacy shouldn’t be a prison.

after some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.

There’s a conspicuous absence of explaining why they wouldn’t do it. What were their actual concerns? Did they not voice them or are they just being withheld?

NC refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time.

Why was this a requirement?

Did we vent in private? Sure.

And what did you say?

Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I’m LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.

Well something clearly happened if his family was brought into it, so if you’re going to skimp on the details, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that.

The whole thing just comes back to the larger issue with discord: the record vanishes.

If it’s a romhacking site, it wont have the actual ROMs, just the patches. It never would have survived 20 years if it had been hosting ROMs.