Discord is creepy if you examine the information they like to collect. On Android, for example, there are 11 unique data points. That’s not just an email.

Personally, if I see a software project on Discord, I nope out. I have made very few exceptions and every time I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth it. Discord isn’t really good for anything other than what it was designed for: Persistent IRC - plus a voice chat option. It’s perfectly fine to chat with a bunch of friends and play some games together. But that is about it.

It is terrible for tracking subjects, for finding information, for storing information, and for engaging in chats across more than one instance. It is unintuitive to navigate, and while they have made improvements, it is up to the user to make a server bearable to navigate by hiding the flood of channels that the average instance contains. Even so, Discord will still try to show you things you have explicitly disabled as a “suggestion”. Discord is bloody intolerable.

So yes, you may grow a community quickly because the people who already use Discord can jump on there. You will, however, lose a bunch of users wiling and able to use a better option who are, most likely, more experienced web users - and sick of the Discord bullshit. While this certainly includes me, I have seen the same sentiment again and again in my feeds. Power users tend to loathe Discord.

Stop repeating the inane and misunderstood.

It’s a shitty browser. Wouldn’t use it myself. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t an improvement on what was there before. The world isn’t black and white - and privacy conscious people stay away from Chrome.

See my other post in this thread for more nuance, but you sound like you shouldn’t be using Chrome in the first place (and maybe you don’t?) I feel the same way personally about browsing and use software accordingly. It is, however, still an improvement for the average Chrome user who is not tech savvy and won’t be using ad-blocking anyway (brrr - imagine using the web like that).

I don’t disagree as such, and I won’t use Chrome, but objectively it is better than what we had in Chrome. While many of us refuse/block ads/tracking completely, many users will now have better privacy with ads that are not micro-targeted on their individual but more broadly targeted with a generalised interest area that varies per visit and adjusts over time to keep it relevant.

IF a user doesn’t disable ads completely, this seems a decent way to make the ads somewhat relevant to the user without the horrible tracking methods in use today. Objectively that’s a better state than seeing ads for something completely irrelevant to the user. Again, this is not relevant for most of us in here, and I sincerely hope most of us don’t use a Chrome-based browser to begin with, but for the average internet user, for whom this is designed, I’d argue it’s a net positive.

It’s a little ridiculous how people misunderstand this issue. This is literally to do away with the extremely privacy-invasive tracking that has been done using cookies and telemetry for years. You will be tracked less in Chrome than you did before, because the browser will hand off less information to sites you visit and there will be a degree of randomisation. This is to get rid of cookies soon, and to randomise the information a site gets when you visit instead of the whole deal.

It is, of course, more personalised than blocking all cookies and randomising telemetry, but if you were doing that, I expect you weren’t using Chrome to begin with. Using a Chrome browser with Topics is inherently more privacy-forward than using Chrome as it has been so far. Honestly, I hope that the deprecation of cookies will even help *Fox users down the lines as they become irrelevant to a large part of the web users.

If you want a solid explanation of what is actually happening with Topics, Security Now episode 935 explains the details. The transcript dives into Topics on page 9, explains the technicalities on page 12 and if you just want the conclusion, you can skip to the penultimate page and read the last few paragraphs in here: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-935-notes.pdf (you can listen as well if you’d rather.)

Unlike Web Integrity Protection this is a reasonable step in the right direction. Can it break down the line? Sure. But then we’re back at where we were. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to use Firefox and Safari and hope that this will eventually help stop the cookie banner nightmare on those browsers as well (even if the cookies do nothing.)

I’m waiting for the book version of this video.

I know this will probably be unpopular, but that’s part of why I’m throwing it in here. Microsoft ToDo started out as a hot pile of garbage after they took over a great to-do app. These days it’s genuinely pretty great, though. Especially if part of what you do involves Outlook or Exchange. You can flag mails and have them show up in a to-do section, it will semi-intelligently suggest things to do next based on things in your to do-list, if you use planner or tasks at work, your things will show up in ToDo as well. I don’t use it for personal stuff, because having the option to quickly have Siri add something in Reminders is super convenient, but other than that it’s definitely a useful option - especially if you don’t use a voice assistant.

Check out NewsFlash https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk

I don’t know anyone actually using WhatsApp - and considering who makes it, I’m not tempted to start on my own. Of course there are other, better alternatives, but you still have to convince others to use what you would like to use. That is an uphill battle - especially with tech illiterate users in your family.

Overcast for iOS is very good, has a fully free tier and it is cheap to support if you want to.

Not sure what she gets from it, but my partner pays for Storygraph because of how bad Goodreads has become.

With iOS 17, web apps will get more features to make them feel more native. It might be so close that it will be hard to tell the difference between a web-developed native app and a PWA. Wefwef is already really nice and it’s mere days old. I can’t wait to see where they take it.

Check out their github to see how new this actually is. I’m blown away that it actually works most of the time and new major features arrive daily.

Check out their github to see how new this actually is. I’m blown away that it actually works most of the time and new major features arrive daily.

OK, thanks. Guess I must have overlooked it when I searched for it (because I started in Firefox). I still think it’s worth to be aware of in case people use some really specialized browsers with certain limitations.

One thing to be aware of is that it should probably be done with the original system browser, so Safari on iOS and Chrome / Samsung Internet on Android. At least I didn’t seem to get the option to add to home screen from Firefox on Android, and I’m also not sure every iOS browser will have add to home screen in the share sheet.

I guess the best explanation is this comic - made as a sort of mea culpa for the original Chrome comic that explained the benefits of going with Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/

And let me take the opportunity to say: Try Firefox. It is definitely a better choice for many people - unless they depend heavily on PWAs. You can probably find your favorite extensions or alternatives to them. I have completely dropped Chromium-based browsers just to help maintain a healthy browser ecosystem, so if one browser fails catastrophically or is steered in the wrong direction (hello Google!), we have somewhere else to go. Chrome is essentially the new IE and that is reason enough for me to use something else. It is bad for the web and it is bad for users.

I do subscribe to Pro. Not really because it’s necessary, because the free version is already pretty great, but it offers a bit more customisation - and it is cheap. I really just wanted to support the devs more than anything.