But when you see a reply from a small account with few interactions high up under a popular post, you’re still going to know it’s a paying simp.

It’s like putting a clown nose whilst wearing your nazi uniform. People can still see the uniform, but now they also think you’re a clown.

Hopefully the native version, coming soon, will be a bit smoother than the pwa and have better integration with the OS.

It’s probably the best pwa I’ve ever used, but it’s still a pwa. And the native version will still just be a wrapper on the pwa, but it has the potential to be better.

That’s what the bowls are for. To catch any drips.

Or set up Overseerr so she can request it herself. If you’re on a fast connection you can go from request to it being in Plex in about five minutes if set to auto approve.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.

I moved from Organizr to Homepage via Heimdall.

I had no end of issues with Organizr. It felt like something broke with each update and performance was pretty bad (not to mention some apps just not working with it). Seemed to be pretty common when I last tried it a couple of years ago, there were lots of similar complaints.

The good thing about Homepage is that the widgets mean you rarely have to go in to each app’s ui, so it actually saves me time.

Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.

My slightly vague recollection was that they were basically feeding “enterprise customers” a load of information including stuff that could be used for union busting, monitoring protests etc. Their enterprise plan has

Feedly AI Advanced Skills: Market intelligence Threat intelligence Biopharma research Competitive intelligence

as features. So yeah, creepy as fuck. And they said at the time that this was all done using “AI”.

I stopped using Feedly after all the creepy AI stuff. Reeder synced over iCloud with an OPML export every now and then keeps it so I’m not reliant on a central service and can run it all locally should I choose.

Anyone using Feedly, or equivalent, hasn’t learnt the lessons of Google Reader. Manage it yourself, don’t rely on a central service that’s going to do creepy monitoring on you to power their AI model.

I’ve been on reddit a long time, over 17 years, and I’m a member of some private subs that happen to have some quite influential users in them. It would be really interesting to open those up to the public to see what reddit influencers are saying in closed spaces, and the amount of gaming etc. that goes on between prominent users you see all across the site.

Admittedly, at least the subs I’m in are relatively quiet these days, but in years gone by they’d basically decide what was going to be popular, who was going to mod which subs etc.

This is almost certainly true. But what I can’t figure out is that Reddit needs Mods for the subs. And surely mods, and potential mods, are more engaged and informed.

There’s always been this implicit understanding that Reddit gets free moderation across the whole site, something other SM sites spend millions if not billions on each year, in exchange for those mods having autonomy, control, and a sense of ownership of the subs they mod. That social contract has completely broken down.

I’d guess mods get into modding for one of two reasons. One is power/influence, which is now seriously diminished, and the other is because they care about the community, and they must now be wondering whether Reddit Inc is the best place to host such a community when it appears to be so hostile to users.