Leraje

Not an American but to be honest, both Google and Apple are appalling. Google openly steal all your data and sell it. Apple do similar but on a smaller scale but also claim they’re all about privacy. Both make it difficult to use alternative app stores but with Apple its actually impossible. Phone vendors can and do install their own awful bloat on Android phones. Apple force you to use webkit for any browsing you might want to do, Android’s native GUI is a mess. Nothing Apple put on their devices is open source so all their claims of privacy can never be verified. Both companies constantly try and impose proprietary standards or charge you a bajillion pounds for a fucking pen or some such bullshit.

The key difference for me is I can put something like Calyx or Graphene on an Android device and use a whole open source ecosystem of alternative apps which vastly improves the privacy of my device.

I get that federation of content is one of the main selling points of the fediverse but doesn’t there also come a point when the format of the content plays a part? Isn’t there an argument to be made that content posted to one type of service (link aggregation) doesn’t need to be shoehorned into the format of an entirely different type of service (microblogging)?

“My initial reaction to this, because our president is a lot of talk, was like ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ … and today I saw it on my new passport,” Schafer said."

The disconnect between what American’s thought Trump would do and what he and his team repeatedly and unambiguously said he was going to do is genuinely dismaying.

I’m not sure this is quite at a face-eating leopard level of denial of the obvious, but its approaching it.