• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 20th, 2022

help-circle


  • Until a viable alternative is presented, I doubt Discord will die anytime soon. Part of the problem is people have a hard time accepting that even if you make the best meal in town, you’ve gotta get people to step inside before they’ll try it. To an extent, this does involve winning a popularity contest of sorts if you want Discord to die.

    I think often times folks are torn between enjoying a space/app as is, and making compromises to attract a larger group. IMO Linux has the same issue and that’s part of why die hard fanboys get so aggressively defensive when this is brought up.

    It’s the software equivalent of being the bitter "nice guy" that simultaneously wants to attract a girlfriend (users) but is kind of an asshole to women. You might think you don’t stink but please wear deodorant.





  • I’m bored so I’m just going to make a list:

    • Lightroom Classic (I’ve tried Darktable, just not for me. I take a lot of photos on my DSLR and I’ve been using Lightroom since 2015 so for me it’s worth eating the awful monthly subscription that I split with someone else.)

    • Anki (flashcard app, very popular among med school students and folks trying to learn new languages. Open source and tons of useful decks available. I’ve aced plenty of exams thanks to Anki.)

    • Bitwarden (finally caved and got a password manager-- could not be happier)

    • CHIRP (the best for programming handheld, mobile and base station radios)

    • CrystalDiskInfo (great for checking the health of SSDs and HDDs)

    • DaVinci Resolve (love using this for video editing-- pirated copy was easy to find)

    • Deluge (great for torrenting)

    • foobar2000 (I love it for music)

    • Greenshot (useful screencapture software)

    • inSSIDer (great for wifi analysis)

    • IrfanView (very good for photo management)

    • MusicBrainz Picard (amaaaaaaaaazing god tier music management software to get all the correct metadata/album art)

    • reWASD ($7 but it’s so good for no BS macro’ing of keyboard/mouse/gamepad shortcuts and profiles. I have two PCs and two mice + gamepad attached to my PC and this software is very helpful. I think the license is for life.)

    • WizTree (SSD/HDD visualization tool that is useful for figuring out what’s taking up too much space on your drive)




  • I think the distinction here is that if your phone provider, WhatsApp, Signal or mail carrier is informed that someone is engaging in illegal activity using their service, these entities would comply and give the information they have on you-- be it a lot like SMS or a little like Signal (phone number, registration date).

    In the case of Telegram, they’ve been informed countless times that specific individuals are engaging in blatantly illegal activity and unlike the previously mentioned entities, Telegram is refusing to comply with any legal requests.

    I believe that’s the situation but if I’m wrong, by all means correct me because this is a very interesting subject.




  • How significant is it that the server code is open-source or not? It’s possible for Signal to publish their server code while running completely different software on their servers. The point of the client is being open source and audited on a regular basis by the community, which is why it doesn’t make sense to trust the server-side software.

    The entire point is that we don’t have to trust the sever at all. The client is open source and regularly audited by the community. As long as the client stays fully open source, everything’s fine. Also, the closed source dependencies are part of a spam reduction effort which IMO is well worth it. Prior to this, Signal had a spam problem and the client itself remains fully open source.

    Signal could have very well not even told people that they added a closed source dependency on Google to its servers and just lied by publishing fake server code that omits the closed source dependency., but instead they were very transparent about the spam problem. In terms of they “why?” regarding the closed source dependencies, their argument is that making it open source would almost immediately result in all anti-spam measures being thwarted. Frankly I’m inclined to agree and again, as long as the client is fully open source and regularly audited, the server code is irrelevant to user privacy/security.

    https://community.signalusers.org/t/spam-scam-on-signal/26665

    https://signal.org/blog/keeping-spam-off-signal/



  • Before Signal made the boneheaded move of removing SMS support, it was so much easier for me to pitch the idea of using Signal to my friends and family, most of which eventually did make the shift from SMS to Signal messages for reasons like ease of use when it came to group chats, sending images/videos, voice clips, etc.

    But now? Now it’s one of those embarrassing moments where I hear back from people basically all saying "your tech recommendations are usually on point but uh, what happened with Signal???" because the app just abruptly stopped supporting SMS and ruined the seamless appeal. SMS support was the perfect way to ease people into shifting towards Signal messages and now the only damn people I know who still know Signal are my most privacy-minded friends/family, while everyone else has switched back to WhatsApp.

    Clearly I’m not bitter…😅 But I mean like, come on. I had the most notorious luddites in my social circle make the switch to Signal and they loved it. The shift from SMS to Signal messages was so smooth so many of them didn’t even have that "I miss [SMS stuff]", plus they LOVED that Signal could be used on their laptops in addition to their phones. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this annoys me so much.



  • As a POC I’d say Lemmy is way better than most similar sites but there’s still the prevalent sexism that always seems like the "acceptable casual bigotry" and I’m not a fan of that. The kind of "jokes" that guys mostly laugh at while women mostly roll their eyes at because the punchline is usually heavily reliant on sexism.