I choose to blame platforms for vile intents rather than users for ignorance. I don’t see awareness of politics of technology as obligatory for all authors (even less for users), but creators of those platforms know damn well what they are doing.

My main beef with spotify is their attempt to privatize and monopolize podcasting.

Spotify offers audio hosting and a large userbase, but does not provide rss. A few people I like are trapped in this, and I have no way to listen to their shows apart from using spotify. They refuse to understand that this is an issue, just like youtubers are ok with lock-in.

Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.

So boycotting, and if you undersrand that, you should too.

So far what I found:

My router has an option to block internet access by MAC address, which is even better than by IP.

LAN mode works via wi-fi, so no cables or flash drives needed.

Also Orca slicer is almost the same as Bambu studio, even supports printer’s camera. Feels even snappier without an account and integration with “store” or whatever that online stuff is called.

Got more interested in trying out VPN now, so I probably could observe prints from a laptop in any location.

Not as bad as I feared, not as good as it could be.

For me it is not so much about personal privacy, as against concentration of power.

Insane money combined with capacity of invisible, precise manipulation of mass information is really hurting democracies. Big tech is already richer than most countries, and their negative influence is more visible than ever. So now we, who believe in democratic principles, have to vote not only with ballots, but also with our choices and our conscious attention. The least we can do is resist this concentration of power on personal level. Ideally - do it together.

I used it for a few years on Oneplus Nord, and a few days ago switched to pixel7 with LineageOS. First impressions are that e/os was much more usable out of the box.

I surely have worse experience with banking: Revolut and SmartID app just refuse to work due to rooted phone (worked well on e/os). Other bank app is somewhat more broken - on e/os it didnt fully load but at least showed notificatioms on each transaction, now doesnt and is useless.
Could be due to newer android version on LineageOS though, I didnt investigate that.

Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral “business as usual”:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo

I used e/os by Murena for a few years already on my Oneplus Nord. Except for banking and some google stuff it works really well. Now that phone is almost dead, and I plan to switch to Pixel 7 pro and probably LineageOS.

I would expect murena’s homebrew phones to be lower class, so if you dont want to flash/install OS yourself, you can also get a refurbished pixel 7 : https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/premium-refurbished/murena-pixel-7-refurbished/

I was lucky to find https://purelymail.com/ which fit my budget and needs - primarily supporting multiple domains for my family and personal projects without extra costs.

Why downvoting? It is good for community to know this, even if content is far from cheerful. Expressing criticism in comments does more for public awareness than making the message less visible.

They forgot the lifespan of the monkey, those thought experimenters.

I can tell them for free: its 42.

Because how could you sell contact data to google and apple if they already have it?

Just took the opportunity to try Thunderbird again and had to downvote myself :) I guess my previous frustrations were related to initial sluggishness while downloading and non-compacting loads tens of thousands of mails from gmail. It still takes some time, but after downloading and compacting my data, search seems to be very responsive.

I am using eMclient for several years now. I would have loved to use open source, but experience of using Thunderbird was unbearably sluggish and glitchy. Other options for windows were simply lacking. EM is far from perfect too, but still better. I hope to retry Thunderbird in upcoming years to check if things under the hood changed much.

Just making structural changes sound like “changing the leader”.