I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won’t stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don’t buy premium.

“Your info won’t be used for ads”. Does that also mean that they won’t collect any info about you? Theoretically, they don’t have any reason to collect data anymore because you pay them.

Same here. It indeed seems to be with the installed versions of websites only. I use lemmy.ml

Ah, on that note, a while ago, I also bookmarked: https://cwtch.im/ I think that is the same of what you mean. But thanks for bring collateral freedom and yggdrasil to my attention. Good food for thought.

I am a bit curious how such a decentralized network would function in terms of performance (especially in the case of many wireless nodes because you need quite some to cover large distances). You can ofcourse use them to get internet over the border of a country that blocked it but I find it hard to imagine how that would function on a larger schale

You also have IPFS. Is that what you mean? It is slowly becoming better and better.

They main problem I have with this is that we don’t have a decent alternative for youtube yet. The main reason I don’t want to pay for youtube is because it is Google. With YT premium you don’t buy privacy (logically you would say with removing ads you also remove the need to track people).

I use an rss reader to follow like 50 websites. The main news sites are arstechnica, the verge, IGN, Polygon and many snaller websites that post less than once a week

And I suppose it is fine that not everybody interacts. They still do something with that knowledge only not publicly. Imagine if those 99% also start interacting. I suppose a community will become messy and people will stop interacting at the end because they don’t feel heard because some people overshadow then with their voice.

“The act of following another account is impersonal and one-sided. Building meaningful relationships with other people is second to amassing an audience.”

This is an interesting statement. While building two-sided relations is indeed very important, it often also is the case that i follow people because they post for example interesting content i want to follow. That person just cant follow everybody back but still provide meaningfull information to lots of people.

That is nice. I never used firefox long enough to find these detailed settings. it is a shame there user share declined so much. It is good to have another browser engine around

Chrome is way overrated, just like edge (a little less) in my opinion. They focus heavily on speed and not on actually giving a unique browsing experience. They dont help you browse the internet efficiently and organized like browsers like Vivaldi do. The appearence of these browsers (and firefox to) stayed quite similar over time. There are better browsers, people just follow the masses and dont even try out new onces.