It’s a generally recognised principle in economics that we want competition to take place, and for consumers to have a choice - for a plethora of reasons too large to list here. The most important IMO is a political one though: we don’t want monopolies for the same reason we don’t want monarchies and dictatorships. Being the sole provider of any very important product puts an obscene amount of power in the hand of a single corporation (or a handful of them). We never want that much power to be so concentrated in so few individuals, because it’s fundamentally injust, and always leads to catastrophe. Also consider that if that power is a corporation or a “private” individual, they’re not accountable to anyone but their shareholders (who, in turn never want the corp to be anything other than a money making machine). Even a dictator is more accountable to his subjects than a multinational corporation is to anyone. So there you have it, that’s why we need alternatives.

The meme makes it seem lime there’s some causal relationship though: because we tried to avoid big corp products and dampen enshittification, the alternatives we started to seek are going bad? I don’t think so. The world at large is going to shit in a general stream of shitfulness, but I don’t think we caused that development by trying to evade the shit.

I’m also having problems using passkeys (stored in Bitwarden) with Github in Firefox. It keeps prompting me to touch the security key, which I don’t have, so I plain can’t use a passkey for Github. Works perfectly for Google though

Passkeys are one exception to the familiar pattern of “we give you more SeCuRiTY so we can spy on you more and control your behaviour better”. They actually are more secure. Problem is, a lot of technical issues with it still, a ton of stuff not working correctly yet

They always attack the one country where the movie was made. That’s why it’s usually the US.

What’s that greyed-out US flag - does it stand for anything specific?

These people aren’t contradicting each other

Is the short attention span responsible for consistently electing people who take basic rights away from people? Bcs imo that is the real problem - not primarily the scum who do the deeds, but the idiots who keep electing them. It goes basically for most of the human race right now, but for the sake argument, let’s stick with Americans for now: WHY did they do that?

I would go so far as to say: they will never be a good billionaire, unless that means a median income in a poor country

Can we get some context over here, across the pond? 🇪🇺

So how is that working out for you? Genuinely curious.

Well okay, but in defense of the Australian army, it could be mentioned that a total of 3 men was deployed against many thousands of Emus. Even if armed with machine guns, those were the 1930ies, and weaponry back then (before WW2) was not comparable to what machine do today…

That was not cast iron, was it?

Yeah, XMPP is great and all, but the client side is a big old mess, everything is full of friction and missing support for feature xyz. Have you tried using XMPP on iOS?

Sure, but now you show me all the clients that supported OTR back then 😜 - or now, for that matter. Besides, OTR doesn’t work in multi user chats. OMEMO does, and support for it is still not exactly widespread…

How many contacts do you have in Threema though?

You mean text editing after sending? I would definitely not consider that a “basic” feature - we are talking about E2EE here, editing a message that you already encrypted locally and then sent on its way is by no means trivial - especially with the kind of E2EE that we have nowadays.

That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn’t have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on

I would not recommend using music to learn a language, especially if the lyrics don’t stick in yr head easily (which IMO is basically its only advantage). The lyrics normally do not contain everyday vocabulary and/or grammar, it’s just not useful for communication. It is, however, often helpful for forming some sort of “emotional bond” with the target language, increasing motivation to dig deeper into it. It can also give you a better access to its specific, well, musical qualities. But then, just the bare spoken (not sung) sound of it can accomplish that just as well, if you’re willing to listen. Music will not help you get along with everyday tasks, improving communications, talking about yourself and other subjects, participating in discussions etc. Intentfully listening to spoken text/conversations is far more effective for that - even more so if it’s authentic (not scripted, not produced for recordings, read by actors etc)

Who didn’t let the Gorilla into the Opera house? The people in charge of that decision