I’d try this, but I don’t know what address to email them at. All of the support / contact instructions are a labyrinth of automated systems, with the fallback option of using the ‘community forum’. Google doesn’t seem to want anyone to contact them for any reason.

I thought that too at first, which is why I tried every other available option first. But that theory is disproven by the fact that the first attempt with the number told me that the given number was not registered to the account (and so I still couldn’t log in). Clearly they were comparing the entered number to something they already had.

Mozilla’s recent blog posts explicitly highlight that they are investing in ads for short-term revenue growth. So when they go on to remove the ToS statement about not selling user data, that suggests to me that their strategy is in fact to collect and sell user data.

Perhaps they aren’t doing that yet, but signs are pointing in that direction. So that does make me reluctant to share any data with them.

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect every individual to become a privacy / legal expert. I think people should have reasonable protections and assurances given to them without needing to study the details of everything they do on a case-by-case basis.

We have laws about what food can and cannot be sold - so that individuals don’t have to personally test and monitor every product for safety. Privacy & data could be done like that too.

The Orange Box 2; featuring Half Life 3, Team Fortress 3, and Portal 3.

• Mozilla is sliding down a slippery slope to enshitification; but they’re still near the top of that slide. The bad stuff hasn’t actually come yet. So Firefox is still top-tier in the short term.
• In the medium term, we can look towards a fork such as Librewolf or Waterfox.
• And in the long term, we’ll probably turn to a new project using Ladybird or Servo.

/r/degoogle is total bullshit. That sub routinely and consistently shits on any non-google suggestion, for all sorts of bogus reasons. It’s like the sub exists to trick people into thinking google is impossible to avoid, rather than just supporting steps away from google.

I found this site useful. The list of alternatives is very large.

From my looking around at other info and advice, I’d say that Posteo is the best one if you don’t have custom domains; and that mailbox.org or possibly Tuta mail is best if do need a custom domain. Tuta is probably best if you need it to be free.

Another solid option not on that list is fastmail.fm (which is Australian).

I reckon Lemmy is actually pretty good. I wouldn’t know if the mobile apps are good, because I don’t use those - but for me the core functionality of Lemmy on my computer is smooth and functional. I don’t see any obvious low-hanging-fruit.

Their official reddit account also tripled down by saying “here is our official response” (and then quoting the Mastodon post). So they’ve explicitly made it the company’s view - not just the CEO’s view.

This sounds like an antitrust legal problem…

I’ve been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I’ve got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don’t want to have to manually visit just to see if there’s an update.

Also, I don’t have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)

I’ve found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the ‘add feed’ box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.

My latest favourite is missing: Note Taking Apps:

• xournal++

Joplin is good for organising text-based notes, so I’m not surprised to see that on your list. But xournal is a for mixed drawing / hand-writing / text, etc. So it’s a different use-case to Joplin. (It would be perfect if Joplin supported xournal notes; so that you could write with xournal and then organise with Joplin. … But that hasn’t yet come to pass.)

In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

When writing my previous post I had started writing a list of suggested strategies; but I changed my mind about posting that. I’m not a member of Mozilla. I don’t know what particular challenges they face, and my expertise are not in not-for-profit fundraising. So although I do have ideas, I don’t really want to get into a trap of trying to defend my half-arse ideas against people picking them apart. It’s beside the point. The point is just that it is achievable, as evidenced by other organisations achieving it.

I will say though that they could at least just mention on the Firefox ‘successful update’ page that Firefox is supported by donations, and give a link. A lot of people really like Firefox; and I think that if Firefox asked for donations, they would get more donations.

Supporting ad networks is not a ‘necessary’ evil. There are many not-for-profit organisations that do not use ads for revenue raising.

I don’t think its viable to post on Facebook (or whatever). with the goal of getting people to stop using Facebook. People on the site will quickly disregard whatever arguments put forward, because it is very hard to maintain credibility while you are on the site that you are arguing against. And if you do make an effort to maintain your credibility there, then you can end up having the reverse effect - in the sense that you are now a valuable contributor to the platform, and people will like and respect your contributions while staying on the platform.

Criticism one platform is more likely to be taken on-board if posted on a different platform though. For example, a lot of people on Reddit argue against Facebook - and I reckon it probably has an effect the people who read it. But obviously it isn’t the ideal target audience. You really want to arguing against Facebook to people who are actually on Facebook!

I can’t really think of a good way to get people to stop using particular social media en mass. (I’d written a couple of paragraphs about general strategies for changing people’s minds; but I don’t think it was helpful enough to bother reading.) I suppose the best option would be government regulation to undermine the targeted advertisement revenue streams. If these platforms were forbidden from collecting and using personal data for advertising, then the incentive for content-churn would be reduced. Without the money, the corruption would no long be self-sustaining. So political action to support strong privacy laws is probably the best way. Aside from that, probably the best way is to degrade the quality of the platforms. Don’t contribute any content to them. Don’t give them any kind of credibility by linking to them (for any reason, even negative attention). If you feel like being chaotic, I suppose you could create spam bots to just make the place worse, but that’s probably not worth the effort. Actual spam-bots are common enough anyway.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

gpl does not prevent the owner from changing the licence later. (Unless it is also making use of someone else’s gpl components.)

For example, Qt has a free version which is under the GPL; and a paid version which is not. So if you were making software with Qt, if you were using the free version, you’d be compelled to also release your product under GPL. But you could then later switch to a paid subscription and rerelease under some other licience if you wanted to.