Could compete how? He gonna buy infrastructure? He gonna be an MVNO? (None of whom are really competitive with the big players because a lot of them are either regional, have to buy batches of data and minutes from the big three, or have pretty bad service). And who’s going to buy it? His supporters? I doubt that. This is just another grift.

I’m trying out nebula because I saw your suggestion and honestly a year for $60 isn’t terrible at all. But I’m having trouble finding creators (not because the app isn’t good but because it seems a lot of the channels I follow on YouTube aren’t on Nebula. I have two devices open actively going down the list of channels I follow on YouTube trying to find channels I want to follow on Nebula and so far I am striking out pretty bad. I hope I can get half the creators I follow on Nebula because so far it’s pretty decent from what I have seen. App is easy to navigate and pretty polished etc.

Is there a way to view who’s on the service (creator wise) before paying for it? Because if not that’s the major flaw with it.

This is why English does the thing. Thank you! Its something I noticed and know but couldn’t put into words.

Fox news isn’t legally considered a news outlet. In fact we have literally seen them admit to not being one in court proceedings.

In the context of my original comment, social media companies like Meta and Reddit have fought tooth and nail to not be considered news networks or news outlets specifically because they don’t want to be beholden to the laws that regulate news outlets/networks. Jeopardizing their ineligibility to be sued for what users post (in the US) by going all in on AI LLM’s scrapers when those scrapers rely pretty heavily on news networks and other media to stay useful means they’ll starve themselves of AI scraped content, and that they’ll potentially forfeit what protections against lawsuits they have. It’s a no win situation for them to continue to bet on AI which has already largely reached the limit of what it’s capable of in current iterations because of the lack of clean organic training data.

So social media are news outlets now. Good. Glad we cleared that up.

I did something of the opposite. I had a Verizon number. I moved it to Google voice. I had a second Google voice number that then became a google fi number. So now I have a Verizon coded google voice number (that my bank accepts etc), and a google fi number that was originally a google voice number. I’m curious how this honestly effects me. My work numbers have never been associated with my personal accounts so there’s that.

If you already had smart replies or similar enabled (they were available before Gemini hit the scene) then you have to go opt out.

ISP’s give us access to the Internet. And we pay them for it. Google makes money via ad aggregation. We already know they were able to do this without siphoning up all your data because they literally made money doing it before 2004 when they launched Gmail. What you’re talking about already exists though. User subscriptions for Email, VPN’s, Search Engines etc already exist and people are using them. People are paying for them.

People also generally understand that if they aren’t paying for a service then they are the product. The thing is though, lots of those people are fine with ads so long as the ads don’t get in the way of them enjoying the product. If I open a website they don’t need to have a full page ad open up when the site page loads. But they do that anyway and that’s what people are largely pushing back against.

Additionally, if these companies want our data? They should do a much better job of safeguarding it, or be held responsible in a meaningful way.

I find it funny that Cozy Grove is exactly the kind of cozy game hiding a really sinister plot title they’re talking about but there’s no mention of it. You know, the game where you (a girl scout style spirit guide) get sent to an island all by yourself for your first scouting adventure and then shipwreck, essential marooning you on an island, and your Troup leader then realizes she sent you to the wrong island but not to worry, she’ll rally to recover you. Eventually. If she remembers and can figure out where you are. In the meantime she’ll comfort your parents as best she can and remind them they signed a waiver and can’t sue. Just you know. Help the spirits that haunt the island you’re on until rescue arrives. If you can get them to move on, more power to you, you can have a badge for that.

So, there’s a inherent problem with blocking working both ways on a forum style site or platform like Lemmy.

When you block someone and the block goes through, if it works both ways, that means your comments or exchanges with that person disappear. The problem with that? They disappear for you and the person you blocked. Anyone else who comments can see the thread. But you both no longer can. So say someone comes along and responds to you on that thread. Or to the other person on that thread? Will their comment go through? Will you be able to see their comment? Will you be able to reply to their comment?

It becomes more complicated and further can affect users not related to or involve with the block depending on how it’s handled and for the most part that’s problematic.

I think we should be differentiating a “block function” (and neither the twain shall meet) from a “mute function” (a one way filter).

I feel like this might genuinely just be better than giving people a false understanding of what the filter they are using does.

I’d love to know what you do when you can’t find a DVD still in print? Media companies like Disney and Paramount etc have been deliberately limiting the number of DVD’s and other physical formats available, putting whole movies and series “in the vault” for the purposes of manufacturing scarcity. Piracy is largely a matter of economic affordability and ease of access. I can pirate. The point is when I had these titles available to buy, I bought media rather than pirate it. I preferred to. And when it’s not easily available or locked to specific services I’m boycotting etc there’s few avenues left. I can appreciate that you were trying to give me a legal avenue to obtain what I want, but I feel like you missed the forest for the trees here.

Looks like from a cursory search only 12 of them available of about 22.

I was. Until they made that so difficult and time consuming that the barrier to entry was too high. Not because of the price. But because of availability. When Google play music was a thing? I bought music. When streaming took over I moved to Bandcamp. But Bandcamp doesn’t have everything. There’s no music stores anymore where I can just go and buy music. It’s all Amazon and similar.

I’d love to own the ghibli collection. But to get it I have to buy the DVD’s (and have a DVD player to play them on), or I have to pirate them. No digital store front seems to have the whole collection. This happens all the time with media that I’m willing to pay for.

I block people mostly because I don’t want to upvote anything they have to say in the future. Usually because something they have said to me or someone else is so egregious that I don’t care to know what else they might say.

The other reason comes down to harassment, or deliberate misuse of tags.

My biggest issue right now is trying to figure out what I need/want to work vs things I don’t need. This list is one I’ve been keeping of things that I want it to do/be compatible with:

-Weather

-Calendar

-News/RSS Feed

-Light Panel

-Media Panel

-Search Query Panel

-Use of Voice controls

-Singular touchscreen hub and android phone

-Works with Google home max speakers and Google nest mini speakers

-Chromecast equivalent functionality

It’s based on the things I use Google Assistant for daily or at the very least weekly. Most all of it can be done with an android tablet and my raspberry pi. But implementing it to be the way I want isn’t as simple (hasn’t been as simple for me) and I think that’s down to following guides for a lot of things that weren’t necessarily intended to work together cohesively.

So, I have several legacy Google Assistant compatible devices that do not work with Google’s new AI. As a result I haven’t switched over to Gemini for pretty much anything and I probably won’t. I’m currently building a Home Assistant system to take the place of Google Assistant when it finally sunsets but the going is slow (I have limited time to dedicate to that specifically at the moment). But for phone specific use, I’m taking the wait and see approach.

I have a Google voice number. You actually can’t. You can get spam filtering which works sort of but definitely not in the same way. I have never had a Voice call use Google’s call screening on graphene os for instance because it doesn’t work. I have graphene os running on a pixel 8 pro for the purposes of seeing what works and doesn’t work to see if I can ever daily drive it. I like graphene os a lot but rely too much on certain Google specific android features and that’s what my first comment was generally talking about.

Part of the reason I haven’t yet moved away from Google services on my pixel is because of the call screening and anti-spam features. I screen unknown callers pretty much all the time so Google is listening if they call me anyway. I’m fine with that, knowing A. That the callers get a heads up that they’re talking to an AI and being recorded and B. That the ones who are human and trying to scam me generally don’t call back once they know the line is being actively recorded.

There’s no feature parity for this on any of the roms I would move to. Taking it a step further is unnecessary for me, and I’ll probably opt out. But I can fully understand why someone might want it (for their elderly family members for instance).

This is what I do when I want to search Lemmy. I put Lemmy: “search for this” into the search box and see what comes up. It works better than Lemmy’s internal search function a lot of the time.