Kevnyon

Considering how long payment processing as a business has been a thing, I’m amazed its not more regulated in terms of being forced to be neutral or being unable to decline processing payments that are related to completely legal transactions.

How Meta was ever allowed to buy WhatsApp without triggering anti-trust laws is beyond me

It was still called Facebook when they bought it.

In my region in Europe, it really is. EVERYONE uses WhatsApp. I’m not sure the last time I saw someone use SMS, its all WhatsApp. iOS, Android, its all there.

There’s nobody on Signal, that’s the problem. If I want to miss out on all of my group conversations, work conversations, messages between myself and others, then yeah, I can switch. But if I want to receive any messages at all, I have to keep WhatsApp installed.

I guess the biggest thing to be scared about would be fomo for most

I don’t mind missing out on some things, but I would mind missing out on literally all of the things. Everyone is on WhatsApp and trying to convince people to switch to a different app when, from their perspective, their current app has over 99% uptime, their kids, their family, their extended family, their friends, all are on WhatsApp. Its the same for me, its everyone. Its just a different situation in Europe.

I wish I could do this, but trying to convince people to ditch an app they’ve never had problems with and where they all have their family, friends, work groups and school groups already mashed together, how do you convince them? Its not even about me convincing my friends or family, its about everyone else doing the same and when everyone has so many contacts in WhatsApp, that number starts to snowball real quick. Its just not feasible to try and explain this to someone who literally doesn’t care. I mean even though I myself know what Meta is and how Zuck is complete asshole, I still can’t switch off of WhatsApp because nobody I know is on Signal and I’d just be alone there. What’s the point? WhatsApp is pretty much the first app anyone installs on their phone (regardless of platform), they’re not gonna switch now.

I agree and I think the cost of paying admins would far exceed that of server costs. Nobody would do it unless they could support themselves with it and that’s a lot of money that you’d have to scrape together to be able to pay multiple admins.

I can afford it too, but I won’t pay for it on general principle when it costs more than Prime and Tidal combined.

Since I am not that familiar with AWS and its pricing, I am not sure. Two years ago on this instance, an admin commented on this thread that it cost 180€ per month to run the server. So that’s at least 2160€ per year and that’s not including the labor and there’s only so much volunteer work that anyone is willing to put in, as is evident with the shutdown of lemm.ee, which cited a lack of volunteers as one of the issues that lead to the shut down.

Yeah, had to move back to this instance because of that. I think that just shows how hard it is and how much funding it actually requires.

Why is stuff like that included not included in every plan by default? As a European, I can’t even imagine paying extra for that. If I want to hotspot my data, my operator can kiss my ass and simply allow it, I’m paying for the data anyway.

This is how I feel about Bluesky. It’s so good, but really needs more people.

Well they don’t directly force you to use it, but when basically all of the most popular browsers (including the default browser of Windows) are Chromium based, that means that developers optimize their sites for that first and foremost. And combined with Google’s amp protocol, which adds control for them, it means that they can dictate many terms for these other companies. It’s like sure, you can use Vimeo to upload your video, but who the hell is gonna see it when there’s YouTube? Same thing here, why use some other standard (such as what Firefox is doing) when the support for Chromium is that much greater, even though it’s more restrictive in others.

Anyone who thinks about this idea for more than 30 seconds decides it is a really bad idea

That’s because of all the problems your idea would cause. Identity theft would run rampant, stalking would become easier than ever before, tracking people down would just be one search, etc. I mean you truly did bring up an unpopular opinion, I’ll give you that.

I believe I got 3.2% this year and 2.8% next year, or in other words, I got completely shafted. Doesn’t even cover food cost going up.