I would suggest we add community nesting. It would allow people to easier find new communities and post in small communities without risking that no-one sees it
One more thing concerning the ‘open source’. Most things Google does aren’t open.
You mentioned Chromium. I don’t think it would have become the most used browser platform if it hadn’t been open. So I’m not sure if it’s a gift or marketing decision. They kinda use it to spy on people/track behaviour. And push the web-standards they like. It’s part of their strategy to retain control over every part along the way and dominate the internet. From servers, to network infrastructure to the end users device and even their software that displays the webpages.
With Android they take extra care to move more and more things into their propretary Google Services. I think the Calendar is kinda unmaintained, the ASOP keyboard is very bare. Half the Apps don’t work without Play Services, Push Notifications are an important part of todays world but proprietary. The camera doesn’t even have half it’s capabilities and the Play Store is set to assert control over the ecosystem. Contactless Payment doesn’t work with open source, …
With Google, their open source always comes with strings attached. They’re not doing it for your benefit.
If you compare it for example with Meta, they just give away PyTorch, React and their Llama2 models because they can and it’ beneficial to them. I don’t see too many strings attached there.
But Google has a few of those, too. TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Gerrit, Angular and the two or three programming languages.
If you like being dominated and the future of the web being shaped for you by a single company, or your wants and needs align well with their motives, I don’t have any objections, though.
First and foremost, let’s get this out of the way…
Fuck the Chiefs.
Now that we’ve cleared up that order of business, yes, it is disappointing that there aren’t many niche communities. I still have to go to /r/raiders because there is little to no activity on the Raiders instances I found. Granted, I’ll admit, I’m kinda part of the problem bc when I looked them up, I just saw the posts were outdated and old, and never bothered engaging, or trying to make those communities happen. I remember they blacked out our sub for a day or week or whatever, and nothing really came of it. Engagement seems the same. I’m guessing sports communities as a whole don’t really care about the bs reddit pulled w 3rd party apps, and probably were less likely to have been using a 3rd party app or cared. I remember seeing comments along the lines of “good, glad the sub’s back. What were y’all even trying to accomplish with your little protest anyways?” I wish people did care because I have to use the shitty mobile site for reddit bc I’m for sure not installing their dumpster fire app.
You can be absolutely sure they’re selling it to every company and national government that will pay for it.
If you’re part of a marginalized group that some government would like to commit a human rights violation against in the last decade, chances are Google was a gleeful enabler on the government side.
I worked for a certain “big data” company that bought browsing histories from Google (and many other companies). They absolutely sell your data; and without even anonymising the personal identification information before selling it.
(I lasted 6 weeks before the lack of ethics forced me to quit. Needed the job to pay rent and buy groceries, but I couldn’t buy enough soap to cleanse my soul).
If you disagree, I’m sorry you can’t remember when there was a time that it was infinitely better. It was so good, in fact, that their name actually became a verb. Crazy, right?
They’re slowly killing Waze by removing features. Believe it or not, that app used to be even cooler too.
Yeah, have to agree on that. Especially if I’m looking for something niche. It used to be the opposite, you went to google if you were looking for something hard to find.
Bing seems to be a lot better for my search needs right now. Duckduckgo is just… a mess if you ask me. No relevance to results whatsoever, I usually find what I was looking for in the 10th link or so… or not at all. After 10, 15 results, duckduckgo just returns irrelevant results.
The image search in Google has gotten better though, so I still use that.
Chromium is open-source. Chrome is not and also happens to constitute a majority of the browser market, and Google has tried multiple times to cash in on this market share to benefit their primary business of advertising to the detriment of users (FLoC, Manifest v3, Web Environment Integrity).
Likewise, AOSP is open-source, but Google has been progressively dismantling it and making various components closed-source (most recently the dialer app).
All this to say, Google is absolutely not friendly to FOSS. As a corporation, they’re beholden to their shareholders above all else and they should be treated as an amoral entity, the same as every other publicly-traded company.
google isn’t amoral , i’m sorry but, what about the google employees who use debian?? or who use krita?? those people are changing the environment!! and the only case in which they can be seen as amoral, is when they are asked for data to the government.
I’m sure they have some Firefox users too. It’s going to take a lot more than a few employees using Linux to convince me they wouldn’t steal both of my kidneys and leave me in an icy hotel bathtub.
Public companies are by definition amoral. They’re beholden to their shareholders and virtually every decision they make is informed by this obligation. Morality generally only factors into their decision-making insofar as it affects PR and thus the bottom line.
I don’t mean to say that Google or any other company is immoral. I use amoral to simply mean that they operate independent of morality. No public company, no matter how much you may like them, is your friend at the end of the day.
Chrome itself isn’t the real problem, how they managed to get Chromium everywhere is. You have one real alternative and that’s Firefox (and derivatives) and it’s barely surviving, which sucks.
Sure, they might not get as much money directly from non-Chrome browsers, but they get to push standards through Chromium.
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