I suspect a lot of people use Facebook because they’ve always used Facebook - mostly older folks at this point - and a lot of the younger folks go there because their favorite association / football club / local restaurant / library are there too.

Meaning Facebook’s success today is mostly inertia: there’s no way any open-source replacement would pull a critical-enough mass of people away from Facebook to fight the inertia and enjoy any meaningful success. I’m pretty sure open-source developers know this and chose something fancier and more exciting to spend their time on.

Creating a Facebook replacement would be about as exciting as creating a Visual Basic replacement: millions of people still use VB, but nobody wants to touch a dying technology.

Facebook is like Myspace: it’s has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that’s the last social media I’d choose to spend my time reimplementing.

That’s because Shitler is obsessed with her, and you hear a lot more about him that you want to also.

Just a reminder: Taylor Swift is a billionaire. Maybe she’s just as principled as all the other billionaires.

opensource can’t be monetized for advertisements.

It can!

That’s what Google did with Android: Google literally made a free open-source operating system everybody could copy, use and develop for for free, to create a wildly successful ecosystem.

Once the ecosystem was fully developed, slowly, year after year, Google moved features out of the open-source AOSP project and into their proprietary stack. Look at AOSP now: it’s a shadow of its former self.

And now they’re killing off AOSP and AOSP-derivatives and turning Android into their own Apple-style walled garden.

I’d say Google very successfully used open-source to its advantage. Google sure knows how to play the long game.

And how long is it going to work?

Do we really want to play cat and mouse with Google? I don’t.

It’s totally butthurt.

People around the world are genuinely pissed that the richest country on Earth is threatening their right to not have to go through another world war because 77 million dumbasses reckoned electing a fascist felon pedo in the White House was a-okay.

My company has stopped selling to American customers, so that they wouldn’t pay tariffs and fund the fascist state each time they ordered from us, and I can tell you the business we picked up in Europe just for deciding to do that is well worth the loss of income from American customers.

did the reviewer really have to rub the “European” aspect of it throughout?

It’s become a very important feature for a lot of people who can’t stand fascism, and a selling point for non-US companies.

If you want this to change, kick the orange utan out of the White House, and maybe in 10 to 15 years, the rest of the world will get over the butthurt.

(no consumer is going to pay for extended) begins to really push people to Windows 11

Consumers aren’t exactly ecstatic about throwing away perfectly serviceable computers just so Microsoft can push their spyware-cum-advertising platform down their throats either.

I’d say this is a great push towards Linux for anybody who knows anything about computers and isn’t a corporation with a dumbass MCSE jockey as an “IT” guy.

It’s been a little surreal watching everything as a self contained file

Yes the main .py is quite a pile of code 🙂

It’s one of those projects that grew organically and never got reorganized. I maintain a niche open-source project like that that has a few dozen kilobyte main Python file and I’m ashamed of it. But then it’s so niche I don’t really want to spend the time reorganizing it.

yt-dlp would benefit from that though…

You guys ever wonder if maybe if the answer is to stop stealing s*?

There are two ways to be honest with normal companies:

1/ You pay them and they stop monetizing your data
2/ You don’t patronize their services and you choose a competitor instead

Unfortunately, with Google as with most other surveillance capitalism monopolies, it doesn’t work that way:

1/ If you don’t pay Google, they violate your privacy and abuse your data. If you pay them, they don’t stop: you just gave them extra money because you’re gullible.
2/ Youtube is a virtual monopoly. There is no valid competition to speak of. And unfortunately, a lot of the societal discourse now happen on Youtube. So it’s kind of unavoidable.

Therefore, Google being the abusive monopoly that it is, you have no way to deal with the essential service they provide honestly and pay your fair share - which I honestly would gladly do - without compromising your privacy. They put themselves in a position to be this abusive.

Therefore, I consider my duty towards paying honestly for Youtube waived. That’s why I’m happy to pay for a FUTO license for the work they do with the Grayjay client, but I’ll never give Google a cent: FUTO respects me while Google spits in my face.

The cynic in me immediately thinks it’s a honeypot to trap privacy-conscious individuals.

I’ll look it up. But I suspect it’ll be just another case of a company pinky-swearing to respect your privacy, like Apple.

Really? Last I tried it - not very long ago - it refused to do anything without an account.

It does but the UI is terrible for TV. It’s totally unusable without an external keyboard and mouse.

SmartTube doesn’t do local subscription, and that’s a big no-no for me.

I wasn’t aware there was a x64 Grayjay desktop app. I’ll check it out. thanks!

The dementia is really starting to show…

What next? It’s available at your local Sharper Image?

What better accessory for your Trump Med Bed than a Mike Lindell MyPillow.
All you need for a restful thought-free MAGA night.