• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yet I often tend to think way too long on even smaller digital expenses, like an app for €2, but I will happily pay €10 for a coffee and a croissant at a train station like it is nothing.

    I think about this a lot too. I spend $10 on a drink that’s gone in a half hour, and I’ll never remember having months from now, but spend lots of time questioning whether it’s worth it to pay for apps I use daily.

    I regularly pay for a VPN, cloud storage, and music/video streaming. I find myself most willing to pay extra for no ads on streaming services I use a lot, even if I only pay for a month here or there (YouTube, Peacock, Hulu). I used to pay for Proton (VPN, Email, Cloud Storage, and Calendar) before iCloud implemented E2EE. Sometimes I’ll pay for news.

    I find a lot of the apps I use I wouldn’t benefit from paying for extra features for, and if I would benefit from them, I wouldn’t have enough free time to use it to justify paying for it. A lot of my needs are covered by the free and/or stock apps.







  • Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What’s more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”

    Terrifying. Thank you for posting.










  • I really hope so. I really miss that feel of the old internet. It’s nice to have an online community where you get to know other users just from seeing their posts regularly. And obviously, I’m all for decentralization at this point after seeing how bad consolidation and centralization of websites has messed up the internet at this point. I still use one forum regularly that’s very active and two others less often that are smaller but have enough active users.

    Obviously, if reddit dies, I could see them making at least a small comeback. But I’m not sure how sustainable they are. It would require several different website owners to make their own websites with different topics of focus. Enough people would have to be able to find the websites in the first place for them to be successful. Like most of the internet, Google as a search engine seems to have gotten worse over the past 5-7 years and it’s harder to find websites, especially smaller, newer websites like a brand new forum. If it’s hard to find, you’re going to be struggling with the network effect for a long time which will cripple growth even further.

    Additionally, without the automatic sorting that reddit and lemmy has, the format of static pages of replies also feels a bit dated now. It’s harder to discover useful/helpful/quality posts without reading through pages of replies. Plus, I don’t know how much money small website owners can realistically make off just putting ads on their website nowadays.

    But I’m rooting for them. I really am.