It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.

Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.

Please donate to Signal if you use it.

I can speak some Boomer. I get this!

I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

Gimme back muh solstice! I’ll worship the dark with whiskey and chocolate and maybe some beef.

Lol, YOUR PC maybe.

The day I wiped all partitions from my dual boot and started fresh with no windows on the machine was a revelation. My heart sang and my soul wept with joy. Windows lives in a caged state now, a neutered monster I rarely demand dance for me because it is ugly and awkward and on an external drive I don’t care about.

I prefer the control of keeping the window alive until it’s time to kill it, then keeping the regular browser window as what few things I allow to persist with login sessions.

Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

A lot of areas that seem like only pedestrian areas in Europe are still roads. Cars regularly drive on tiny streets, especially in Italy and France, nearly clipping people eating dinner.

Then a lot of hollow threats, and standing in a big group shouting “waaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” Thinking something is happening and you’re flashing colors, then flying away shouting “I’ll defeat you later!”

I simply do everything in private windows and accept whatever. Then flush the cookies down the toilet 5 minutes later.

Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.

“Oh, I hope this doesn’t awaken something inside of me…”

FS?

As in “F’ing Shit”?

Some southern Slavs call tap water “technical” because it’s technically safe to drink, but definitely has a lot of stuff in it that you don’t want to drink… You complain as you chain smoke.

TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins

Thanks for the links!

Or Latvia?

I feel it. I feel the cosmos!