Thanks for posting this discussion, I agree with the general consensus from the edit.

Thumbnails are annoying to deal with, and I had trouble the few times when I tried to address it in my own posts. It’s a lot more work to pull a different thumbnail and replace the autogenerated one, especially if you’re on mobile and just want to share something quickly. Still, if someone is posting low effort spam/clickbait often, I’d agree with a mod telling them to knock it off

crashes

Maybe, but could it also be an intentional dark pattern to make it difficult to cancel?

Just do like 10 minutes of research before you buy

The average person might not know what’s reputable and what’s not. A lot of the VPN review sites are also secretly run by the VPN companies, or get paid off by them. Someone might even mix up the bad PrivacyTools for the legitimate PrivacyGuides

On a related note, this story from 2024:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks-onavo-vpn-used-to-wiretap-competitor-data-court-filings-reveal

Even ignoring any ownership issues, it’s an awful service. If you look up “ExpressVPN cancel” you’ll find lots of posts and comments from people complaining that they were charged again after cancelling, that the interface makes it difficult to cancel, that they needed to reach out to support multiple times, etc.

Instead:

• Use a different VPN
• Check if you actually need a VPN for your situation

I check this guide from time to time to see if anything has changed with the usual recommendations:

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/

A few other notes

• MSN links are annoying because they act as a wrapper for the content that another actual news site put out. Finding the original link is better for everyone, and it helps on the Lemmy side since then the UI can indicate cross posts with that correct link

• I don’t find as much value in news stories with “Trump says” in the headline. It helps in order to anticipate what kind of issues he might cause next, but otherwise I’d much rather read what actually happened instead of losing brain cells reading what trump said about it

A relevant community for anyone visiting this thread:

[email protected]

I tried with the latest version of chrome and no extensions, still getting an error. I think the problem is with them.

I think what they’re saying is that, to a lot of people (myself included), Signal is currently the best option despite being centralized. The decentralized options have UX issues, too small a user base, or aren’t well known enough to have gone through robust security/privacy reviews. While you can’t see what’s running on the signal servers, the app is open source and so far it looks to be encrypting the information correctly and it’s not sending anything but the minimal data to their servers.

‘A lot of eyeballs on the code’ is only relevant for open source apps. They were making a comparison between Signal and the many other open source mobile messaging apps.

You might also find this chart helpful if you’re looking for other alternatives. Personally, I found Signal to be the best one to get my friends and family onto

https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

Looks good, I’ve added it to this post and the two pinned ones

Finally! This was keeping me from recommending Signal to more people

If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.

If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.

That’s excellent to hear. Hopefully no one abuses the media backups, I would understand if they did it by file sizes

For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing !askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221

“Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

For questions that are more specific to your situation:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Group specific communities:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):

• [email protected]

There are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features

https://zulip.com/

https://revolt.chat/

https://mattermost.com/

https://www.rocket.chat/

Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively

You might like [email protected], which is specific to software

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

I see, I’ll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don’t change the defaults.

I think they’re referring to Firefox’s funding, a lot of which was through search deals

An article from 5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox

edit: seems like that hasn’t changed by this ruling either

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

Same creator as Faster than Light, which is also on sale

I blame all the similar sounding terms and organizations in the fediverse space. It’s actually pretty cool

What SWF is:

In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation. The organization aims to tackle the various headaches and challenges the ActivityPub ecosystem has faced over the last decade of its development. Their mission? A bigger, better Fediverse.

From this article:

the SWF has been working on several interesting projects outside of these stated scopes, and it’s something Evan Prodromou has been bullish about: leveraging the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. Historically, this piece of the ActivityPub protocol is rarely ever implemented, due to complexity as well as the fact that Mastodon’s own client API has seen widespread adoption.

To really understand the C2S API, we have to go back in time to when the protocol was being developed. The basic concept was that any ActivityPub implementation would effectively act as a generic server, with clients providing unique experiences. Compared to Mastodon’s dedicated API, C2S isn’t explicitly limited to microblogging or statuses. Instead, clients dispatch activities to and from an Actor’s inbox and outbox.

Instead of every new social experience in the Fediverse acting as a bespoke server, the C2S API instead lets a wide range of clients interact with an instance. Instances no longer become specific delegates of what activities can or cannot be used. C2S opens the floodgates for any kind of application to hook in to a Fediverse account. Instead of an instance doing all the hard work, clients would handle much of the advanced logic themselves.

Setting aside unique applications for a moment, one of the key killer-features that ActivityPub C2S could offer the Fediverse is a coherent and streamlined login system for any Fediverse account.

It then has some other examples of how this protocol is being used

They do make it possible to adjust the ratings on your own account for the ones you disagree on. It doesn’t affect the newsletters, but I find those to be too american-specific anyway

specifically trained chatgpt not

Often this just means appending “do not say X” to the start of every message, which then breaks down when the user says something unexpected right afterwards

I think moving forward

• companies selling generative AU need to be more honest about the capabilities of the tool
• people need to understand that it’s a very good text prediction engine being used for other tasks