- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Google Play has delisted UpScrolled, the “censorship-resistant” social media app founded by Issam Hijazi, following its rapid growth to over 2.5 million users and its brief stint as a top-ranked alternative to TikTok.
While the app remains available for existing users, Google has not provided a specific reason for the removal; UpScrolled’s team confirmed they are working with the Play Store for reinstatement while maintaining their commitment to unfiltered content.
This development follows the app’s rapid ascent in popularity, particularly amid concerns over content moderation on competing platforms like TikTok.
Google is a fucking monopoly. (Please do not use any Google product. If you care about freedom, there are tons of alternatives for most products.)
Start with:
switch to DuckDuckGo search or Brave Search
switch to Firefox on your phone and use uBlock Origin (not the weak lite version, but the full Origin version)
Good job you’ve done 80% of the work. You can continue to de-Google
btw
Don’t use brave it’s still chromium/ pays Google
I use Firefox bro 🦊
Waterfox ftw.
Honestly Firefox is fine for now until they add their AI shit
I switched to Vivaldi and Ecosia, barely notice a difference.
Ecosia is OK, but if you use Vivaldi (I’m guessing it’s Chromium) you will give power to Google. If we want to fight Google, there are three main areas.
1 - The most important is search (fortunately they suck and it’s easy to change).
2 - The second most important is Chromium (there is only one alternative, Firefox - I don’t count Safari because it’s for Apple devices). Firefox has Manifest V2; if we lose this, we lose great power.
3 - The third most important is YouTube. I think this is the hardest one because maintaining a video-sharing platform is very expensive, and it’s not something that can live just with donations.
Vivaldi also kept Manifest V2, so old extensions do keep working there. They also have a mastodon server, and email/calendar/feeds, so they offer more out of the box than Firefox. Lots of projects built on other open source projects like Chromium and KDE do offer legitimate alternatives.
YouTube has to be replaced with a decentralized torrent-like based system where every user shares the load with what they are watching.
this could be great for popular content
It would be a great solution for most media only because computers are so fast and have excellent connections nowadays. I think if everyone just hosts their own content through a system like this we can preserve even niche content.
Obviously there would be some serious technical hurdles such as search. It wouldn’t be a magic bullet, but a good compromise to the top-down Monopoly we have now.
This is very good idea but we’d need domains for that
For #3, how much would it actually cost to host a medium sized YouTube channel on peertube? I top off my prepaid hosting costs every few years to cover my website’s remarkably high traffic (just me and a few other people :P). Consequently I have no idea how much it would cost to self host a site with actual visitors and video content.
I guess too much because think like you have 1000 videos each video is ~500 mb (also you’ll need to store 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p versions) let’s say 1 GB storage for each video, total storage need: 1TB just for one channel it’s ok but there would be like 10k channel at least
1 TB * 10000 = 20 TB * 500 = 500 hard disk with 20 TB
let’s say each one is $350 total $175,000 (and this is hard disk I thing you’re not going to use hard disks)
(and this is just storage I don’t know about traffic costs)
Nice
My main problem now is that Google has a monopoly on the Android app store. Plus, most banking apps use play services, so good luck using your own phone ROM.
My bank has a mobile site that is more functional than their app. I guess that’s not the case for every bank.
do they expect from me to throw my phone away becuase it’s old? hardware is working great >5 years but they limit the software and of course I will pass that limit
it’s not that hard to do if a company don’t accept/respect your choice then you shouldn’t accept them
edit: typo
I use a custom ROM (idk if this is the right word). I don’t have Google Services or any Google apps. My previous banking app didn’t accept custom ROMs, so I just canceled that and switched to one that does accept them. Now my banking app works great and I have no problems on my phone.
the only thing I can’t replace yet is Maps. reviews, photos, in-trip driving instructions, it’s just so full-featured I can’t imagine myself without it
I haven’t used Google Maps for four months. OpenStreetMap has been enough for me. I don’t need reviews, photos, or driving instructions. Also, the constant use of navigation apps is atrophying our mental mapping skills.
OSM from F-Droid is the way, but there are a lot of apps now based on OSM data that are also very good like organic maps. It can be hard to switch over metadata, and you might lose some of the conveniences, but it’s manageable or even better for some uses like hiking.