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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • OpenStreetMap’s platform is the only real way to compete against Google and Apple and it’s why Microsoft even though it has Bing Maps, has licenced to them resources like satellite imagery for mapping. It’s awesome in bigger population areas but there’s still a lot to map in rural places outside the EU.

    Review is harder. Right now the leading open platform afaik is Open Reviews (aka Mangrove Reviews) which has tie-ins to OSM projects like MapComplete. OsmAnd and OrganicMaps have open tickets to hook into that ecosystem. You’re right about the userbase problem though, I think it (or a successor) needs AP federation to really take off. That being said there’s several active non-Google nonfree alternatives like Yelp and TripAdvisor as well as niche sites for things like camping, parks, and schools.




  • Open source software might not directly be used in the workplace but if someone can’t adapt from LibreOffice to MS Office they won’t be able to adapt to MS Office updates either. It’s been decades since productivity software had significantly different feature sets for most users. That weird legacy Excel formula the Finance Department uses will need training no matter how many years of Office experience a new hire has.










  • YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid-on-instagram-tiktok-youtube). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.

    You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.

    I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?


  • I totally agree we can’t simply drop SMS immediately, but what am I missing in supporting backwards compatibility (for example via my pseudo number solution, like how VOIP works) preventing us from moving forward during a stagged shutdown in the span of decades? MMS and RCS both would also fail under cellular data loss, and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters. I’m not sure I buy the argument you can’t have similarly low energy towers (even with net neutrality states, you can still cap all bandwidth per user), and a simpler tower that only does data should be far more reliable than a tower that provides multiple carrier services given the simplicity (and it’s very rare to have towers that only do voice + SMS anymore).


  • Yeah that’s a big problem that I’m trying to research solutions for myself too. It was way better when I could tell people to just install Signal and it’d replace their SMS app but be secure when others use it, but unfortunately Signal dropped SMS. Currently I just have all the apps, but since Signal does contact discovery (like Whatsapp) I follow a Signal, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, RCS (via Google Messenger), then SMS pattern and stopping when I can contact someone. Obviously, this has the issue that all these apps are getting far more data than they need and I’d like to look into a multiplatform app that does e2e. From what I’ve researched so far, Matrix bridges (servers that connect your Matrix account to a third party messaging service) might be the answer.

    I haven’t tried it yet but there is a Matrix bridge that you can host if you are selfhosting a Matrix server (or use a commercial Matrix provider that already hosts it) that will allow you to connect to your Whatsapp friends without needing the Whatsapp app yourself that could be interesting for at least that use case https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html?bridge=whatsapp .