Self-hosting media can pretty much be as cheap or as expensive as you want.

My friend plugs an external drive into an Nvidia shield and it works fine.

An old laptop from eBay works well too, with the additional benefit of essentially having a built-in UPS.

You don’t have to have a crazy setup.

They put out a post about why they did it. But basically it comes down to it being illegal where they are, and the admins don’t want to be arrested.

As much as I hate that it’s blocked, I also don’t want possibly the largest Lemmy instance’s admins arrested or dragged into a court battle. I think that would be devastating for Lemmy as a whole.

It’s understandable to fear being arrested or financially ruined if some shithead company decides to go after you.

That said, maybe it’s time I make an account on an instance that has a more cavalier attitude towards piracy.

Depends, no?

Do you compare it to a cheap Netflix subscription, do you compare it to the 4K subscription? Do you compare it to Netflix with the multiple locations extra fee they charge now?

Do you add the cost of Disney+, Prime Video, and god-knows what else?

The costs can quickly add up.

And it’s not like you need a beefy server. I could host Plex on an Nvidia shield (which I have anyway for my TV), in which case the cost would only be that of a USB drive or external HDD, and a trivial amount of extra power.

Using the 7bn parameter variant:

You shouldn’t joke about these things, man.

I accidentally set up a home server running Plex/Jellyfin, and now I control all my media without paying £18 per month (and probably due to rise soon, like the US pricing) to a company that only has a handful of things I like and regularly takes away content, plus prevents account sharing.

You wouldn’t want someone else to accidentally do that, would you?

E: yes people. I get that your setup is expensive. But you don’t have to spend a lot. You can host a Plex server on an Nvidia shield with some external storage, you can buy an old crappy PC/laptop on eBay. A media server does not require beefy hardware.

You are very very much in the minority. The backlash was enormous and the user count plummeted.

There’s no way to argue that it defeated the purposes of Signal. Nobody forced you to use SMS.

Why would she ever need to use a terminal?

I imagine she’d be doing normal computer stuff, not writing bash scripts.

I swear half the criticism of Linux I see online is based on people thinking Linux has remained unchanged for the past 16 years.

I don’t even have a terminal app installed. It’s not required for anything I do on my PC.

It’s incredible that everybody was fine with SMS in Signal behaving this way, which is vastly less secure.

There will be more privacy, because there will be more Signal-to-Signal chats.

Also, SMS support is vastly less secure, yet Signal users loved that, and there was backlash/mass exodus when they dropped support.

and there needs to be a reason for people to switch; what’s that then?

As I already stated: privacy. People want privacy, but they also want people to talk to.

If Signal can only speak to Signal, nobody will get Signal because then you can’t talk to anybody. And there’s no point of a chat app where you can’t talk to anybody.

Add interoperability and suddenly people are more willing to try Signal because you won’t be a social outcast with nobody to talk to anymore. Suddenly you have a few contacts that are on signal and find the app convenient to use. Then the users grow from there. Meaning more Signal-to-Signal chats.

I’ve started that 3 or 4 times now.

I also don’t appreciate how you appear to be acting like speaking with WhatsApp users is mandatory. It’d be an optional feature just like the (vastly less secure/private) SMS was. Even for those people, this change would be a major win, because they’d have more people to talk to as more people join the app.

There would be more people willing to try Signal because they would still be able to talk to people and not become a social outcast.

More people using signal would then mean more Signal-to-Signal chats.

More Signal-to-Signal chats is a good thing.

How could it not lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats?

The biggest problem with signal is that nobody uses Signal. Everybody uses WhatsApp.

If you make it so people can switch to signal without it completely cutting you off from the world, then more people will use it, which will lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats, which will lead to signal becoming widespread enough that people shift from WhatsApp.

Ok, that’s your guess.

90% of my contacts did leave Signal because of the SMS removal. And that’s SMS, which nobody uses.

People being able to use Signal without being cut off from the world would be massive in terms of getting people to use signal. Which like I said, would mean more Signal-to-Signal chats, which would bring more and more people to signal once they see that it’s an actual worthwhile platform.

Because more people would be on signal, which means more Signal-to-Signal chats.

As I explained in my post.

I’ve tried extensively. For years. I was a regular Signal donor, too.

I don’t know where you’re from, but in much of the world, asking someone to use something other than WhatsApp is like saying “stop using email”, it’s an extremely difficult sell.

Unfortunately this doesn’t actually work. Even if people do try Signal, they see they only have one or two contacts, and they go back to WhatsApp.

would it, though

Yes? 100% it would?

A fair amount of people don’t want to use WhatsApp, but they have no real choice because it’s practically a requirement for living in modern society.

If you make it so they can still chat to people on WhatsApp, they can go to Signal without worrying about that.

why would anyone move away from Whatsapp if they could talk to Signal users without switching apps?

Why would anybody play games on Linux via proton if they could just stay on Windows? Because they don’t like Windows.

Like I said above, plenty of people don’t like Meta, they use WhatsApp because there’s no real choice. Offer them a choice, and more will take the plunge.

And why would anybody move to Signal if they can’t talk to anybody?

The massive drop in users after getting rid of SMS support shows that people are willing to use Signal if they can still talk to people, but aren’t willing to use it when they can’t.

Signal declined, despite the EU bending over backwards and handing them the chance on a silver platter to become relevant.

IMO it’s a mistake, like getting rid of SMS support was (which is far less secure than WhatsApp yet Reddit/Lemmy seem to be angry about that but glad about lack of WhatsApp interoperability?? I guess it’s because Americans don’t really use WhatsApp so it’s not a big deal to them, whereas SMS is).

It would have been an amazing opportunity to help those that want to use Signal actually use it.

Yes, I’m aware Meta scrapes what metadata they can from messages, but if you make this clear in Signal when you talk to a WhatsApp user then I don’t see the issue, after all it’s what they did for SMS chats yet everybody loved that feature!

People trying Signal because it’s compatible with WhatsApp that everybody uses would lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats, and that’s a good thing.

The Signal foundation seems to care more about being ideologically pure for its 10 users than they do about making a small compromise that leads to far more users and far more Signal-to-Signal chats. It seriously disappointed me, and I stopped my £10 monthly donation hearing that bad news. I was so invested in Signal because I thought it was a great app, but there’s no point of financially supporting the growth of an organisation that vehemently rejects growth, I was throwing my money away.

I went from having 10 contacts on Signal down to just one after the SMS purge. I want to use this app but it’s pointless. Nobody wants to use an app that nobody uses, and Signal doesn’t seem to want any users either.

Frankly, I don’t buy their excuse. If they were truly that ideologically pure about absolute privacy, they’d never have added SMS support in the first place! And they wouldn’t have tied accounts to phone numbers either!

I think the reason they ditched SMS was down to development costs. Maintaining that functionality, as well as building RCS support, is far more expensive than simply cutting the feature out and trying to salvage some “it’s about privacy!” PR. I think the same is true for WhatsApp integration.

E: I knew this would start getting heavily downvoted once the Americans started logging on. Please try to understand that WhatsApp is big in much of the world. Everybody uses it. My bank wouldn’t let me take out a mortgage without WhatsApp. That’s how ingrained it is. Being able to use Signal and still receive messages from people would go a long way in getting people to install the app.

Surprising nobody. This is like when Instagram and WhatsApp introduced Snapchat stories “Updates”.

Maybe it varies by country, but I’ve seen no shortage of far-right content on TikTok.

I mean shit, look at the Romanian elections - TikTok was aggressively pushing a right wing, pro-Russia candidate who declared that he spent 0 on campaign finances.

I go on there and there’s a lot of ReformUK (Nigel Farage’s party) and GB News (British Fox News though thankfully far less watched) clips.

I have a French friend and he says the same is true there.

I mean sure, but if you look at it that way, vertical also ‘works’ on TVs.

The point is that when you’re scrolling through stuff on your phone, you do it portrait.*

*Since this is the internet, I know I’m going to get a “But I scroll through everything on my phone landscape”, because of course I will. That’s cool. Go chat about it with the other 0.002% of people who do that.