the biggest reason for subscriptions is. 1. consumer laws don't protect it. and 2. you can quit your job and don't have to be actually productive and work for a living because your users will just keep on "buying" the product every month indefinitely. and finally 3. subscription basically gives you monopoly in any given area you host it; because the user will usually not look or even have the means to look for options or alternatives once they have already tied a percentage of their monthly income to a company for the software or service they provide - as wallets got spread thinner and thinner until they, now, are entirely swallowed by subscriptions.

the only people arguing in favor of subscriptions are those who don't want to work for a living while still taking advantage of the capitalist system.

the entire saving grace of the fediverse is a lack of algos and curation of your own content. algorithms have basically broken social media and the way we interact with the web. quality and substance is nowhere to be seen for the past few years and many of those who migratate to the fediverse do so specifically for the improved quality of content - it's the whole selling point.

gnome currently because nearly everything i use is designed for gnome and looks mismatched on other DEs. but the gnome workflow largely feels like a prison.

hold up, then what is the purpose of Copyright in the first place? Are they arguing copyright no longer serves its original function? To protect the authors work? When was this change made to the law?

ah, it's possible BankID has a different authentication process in norway. while it's privately owned, they probably have actual requirements and guidelines to follow in norway as opposed to sweden.

they run verification through google/apple services. so we scandinacians can't use a degoogled/microg android phones at all. at one point (long long ago) they used to run their own which made it available on any platform, but that service mysteriously died the day ubuntu phone launched. very coincidental.

it's a privacy nightmare as it relies on google and apple servers to authenticate verification. neither of which are private. it also makes it impossible for european alternative operative systems to enter the market - giving a foreign state, the US, full control over what we can and can't do.

you can't both expect profit and good maintenance. pick one, or the other. in all things. that's why roads aren't privatized. or the fire brigade. etc.

honestly, this is a great point in favor of arguing a switch to FF. if all the plugins that are now getting wiped from chrome move over to FF and tell users they are now availablr on FF, and users advertising just use X plugin on FF to solve glaring issues with chrome, then there is no incentive to stick with chrome anymore.

or maybe this has been the thing all along and i'm just slow 😅

capitalists have paid harris to kick her out if she wins, so lina khan will be gone soon regardless of who wins.

facebook, google talk, etc. all relied on the XMPP protocol. you could add your facebook messenger friends to google talk or any of the open source clients like pidgin. it was the holy era of instant messaging. federated. solution. no bullshit lockdown to a specific system like in the days of ICQ, Skype, etc.

then both facebook and google talk locked down their XMPP server and i lost 80% of my friendlist on XMPP. and that was that. i had to get facebook. i had to get google mail. especially relevant when microsoft bought skype and it turned to shit.

guess what. today we're split on even more clients than we used to be. need signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, telegram, discord, band, matrix, threema, session, irc, slack, and steam chat installed on my fucking device. and all because meta and google pulled the rug to isolate their systems and force user conversion.

no, thanks. open source federation is the only solution to unshitification and that's never going to happen as long as people do shit like leaving x for bluesky instead of mastodon etc. leaving facebook for band instead of literally any other fediverse platform (because facebook has devolved to ads and facebook groups - everything else is irrelevant or dead on there). etc etc.

i haven't used gomuks, i'm not a big fan of terminal applications

nheko has so many issues. one version it was impossible to login. then when they fixed that, the encryption kept breaking and a lot of messages from my friends were lost. it also lacks a lot of features. last time i tried nheko was in january. so maybe they have fixed the stability issues and added some modern features; but otherwise it can't compete because it can't be used as a daily driver.