Fairphone, Librem, PinePhone, f(x)tec, etc. are available alternatives, yes.
Even a OnePlus is better than directly funding and supporting the adversary organisation that is one of the biggest surveillance capitalism corporations on earth.
I keep seeing this idea everywhere. Buy a Google phone and install another OS.
It is completely absurd to fund the exact adversaries you are running away from, while consuming, without contributing a dime, merely a piece of free software. (It is only a small piece of freedom because none of the hardware is free, and some binary blobs [incl. potential backdoors] will still be present in the alternative OS no matter which one it is.)
This is unsustainable, terrible, damaging advice. Stop giving it.
“Let the votes decide the quality of the content” is capitalist rhetoric that was the start of reddit’s end. It is not an argument, it is not a principle to stand behind, and it most definitely is not a better alternative to guidelines the community can vote on.
I am aware of the difference in philosophy taken by both Gnome and KDE, but would you mind elaborating on the ‘assholes’ bit?
Honestly, I am always appalled by most “pop”-tech journalists like these. They either just repost the tech specs with the least nuance known to mankind, or they make absurd assumptions by having weird expectations (i.e: the infamous Cuphead review) going in. Seems like in this case it is both!
I attribute this to the much centralisation that completely deformed the internet, and a totalitarian attitude to criticism by critics (hypotactic, isn’t it?) they remove and/or make it very hard to have a discussion on their articles.
Back before much of this centralisation of the internet, low-effort popcorn reviews like these would be absolutely panned in the very visible comment section. Also, shitty editorialised titles (which by the way usually aren’t even by the author) like these were not as prevalent without massive scrutiny.
Not gonna happen, the developer made it quite clear from the get-go. Also, their community are quite hostile against it and pretty much most FOSS stuff for some reason.
I can see a fork taking what is useful about it (UI/UX) and adopting solid backends (federation, proper VoIP with screen sharing, etc.)
Your public domain assumption doesn’t have to apply to others, legally or ideologically.
Data ownership does exist in the Fediverse, in fact it is one of its selling points that you can set up your server and own the data instead of using a surveillance capitalist SaaS that stores, manipulates and imposes legal rights over your data. Applications like Mastodon do send a federation request to other instances to delete data if submitters want to. Additionally, some users put licenses on their profile that might have restrictions (i.e: CC non-commerical, etc.) on what you are legally allowed to do with the data.
So no, accessing the data is not the same as using or processing it for many people, legally too in several parts of the world. Also, “innocuous curiosities” label is entirely subjective.
It is not about “bragging” or whatever. Nor is it about “bad” or “good”.
By funding or promoting the use of Google products, you would be funding litigation and influence such as lobbying to keep poor regulation as it is, if not worse. You would be funding their acquisitions of great tech and startups that might offer a more ethical and/or free technology. You would be funding their poaching of said engineers and valuable hardware intellectual property.
Simply put, it is a counterproductive and an unsustainable practice.
That being said, their amazing engineers, and technical value of their hardware are irrelevant to this community, post and comment. That simply doesn’t excuse their entire business model being built on breaches of privacy and other forms of curbing user freedoms.