But… Blaming people who are being fucked over by forces generally outside their control is not really going to help their or our situation. Expecting or demanding “people” to just change is also not realistic. Even if they wanted to, time, effort, energy, knowledge, skills, and attention are all finite. This is just one important issue or source of exploitation among a sea of others.
But… Blaming people who are being fucked over by forces generally outside their control is not really going to help their or our situation.
The whole premise of the comment is that it’s not outside of their control, they just chose not to be responsible for the agreements they make. If you have any better suggestions than blaming those responsible for the situation I’m willing to listen and maybe even change my mind.
Expecting or demanding “people” to just change is also not realistic. Even if they wanted to, time, effort, energy, knowledge, skills, and attention are all finite.
Is it more unrealistic than “we” deciding to change and find a better path forward than surrendering our digital lives to strangers? I’m able to self-host my own push server. I wasn’t born with that knowledge. I had to invest time, effort and energy to gain the knowledge and skills. If I can, so can others. I am not an extraordinary smart person.
Still, long before one starts to self-host entire platforms like NTFY or Nextcloud Push, there’s a ton of free to use services ran by idealists rather than capitalists. Or payed options with good terms. There’s so much between just not caring and being ones own sysadmin that I don’t think “don’t have the time” is a valid excuse anymore. It’s not just push messages, it’s everything - as you point out:
This is just one important issue or source of exploitation among a sea of others.
Sure. And most people I offered a free Nextcloud account to said the same. And Mastodon/Friendica-accounts. And so on. It’s like a technological mass depression, we can’t do everything we need to so there’s no point doing anything at all.
And today I’m running a custom ROM and no push services from Big Data while they’re literally getting robbed of their phonebooks by Meta.
More like the super healthy farmer is handing out organic food for free but people rather eat at McDonalds because it’s nearly packed and that’s where most people eat.
They’re also dreaming if they think doing these things doesn’t just make them stand out, and provides them any real protection from state actors.
The number one rule of tradecraft is to blend in. I promise that you haven’t thought of some way of using an always connected smartphone that the NSA hasn’t considered. They are probably the ones making your degoogled ROMs.
This is hubris, plain and simple. If your goal is to hide from state actors then the best way of doing that is to be uninteresting statistical noise.
Most “standard” messaging apps (that includes signal, telegram) use the “OS provided” push service. On Android, they use firebase cloud messaging, a component of google play services.
Degoogled Android means not having any notifications, unless the app supports UnifiedPush, runs in the background 24/7 (which drains battery), or runs in the background occasionally (which delays notifications).
If the app runs in the background occasionaly, you can “burden” the people on the other side by being slow to respond.
Eh, I use a few apps that have true foss forks and thus don’t use gcm but the keep-alive method, and I didn’t notice a difference in battery when I made the switch.
Also lol #3 isn’t exactly a “burden”, take the hint and go away people. Let me live in blissful solitude.
Pretty much my experience with pull-based notifications. I’ve even tested the same client on the same setup against both NTFY and client-pull without seeing a noticable difference in battery usage.
Well I’d say those going the degoogle route learn about things like Unified, NLP, etc, along the way. But it is something the end user has to handle themselves, rather than it just being there in the OS.
That’s why I bothered to set up a nixOS config to deploy a docker cluster… I’m planning to give my friends and family a USB that connects to a private shared VPN, so all I have to do is walk them through booting from it
We all get a way to back up stuff with redundancy, and I’ll throw up a Jellyfish server, maybe set up some llm assistants to scrape the web for interesting news and put it in a Lemmy instance or something. These are all things I want for myself, and I am willing to configure it exactly once… At that point, might a well let people I trust join the cluster.
Even my technical family used to scoff and ask why bother… This last week when my sister called and asked what I was up to, instead of explaining that it’s more than just targeted ads, I asked if they noticed that everything sucks way more lately.
They never used to listen before… I think that’s changing. I think it’s time to build out alternatives
This isn’t just old people, tech illiteracy is high even among young people. Getting the average user to host their own server, for anything, is a pipe dream.
Is there a self-hosted alternative to SMS push? That’s my main push notification, I can’t think of another “service” I use on my phone. I’m an edge case though, already degoogled and don’t let much push to me. SMS is a necessity for work and personal.
Hell, SMS is clear text, no need to get the notifications.
This issue is about the notifications for (supposedly) encrypted chat apps hat use Apples notification service (and Google’s) such as iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
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I agree those are good things to do.
But… Blaming people who are being fucked over by forces generally outside their control is not really going to help their or our situation. Expecting or demanding “people” to just change is also not realistic. Even if they wanted to, time, effort, energy, knowledge, skills, and attention are all finite. This is just one important issue or source of exploitation among a sea of others.
The whole premise of the comment is that it’s not outside of their control, they just chose not to be responsible for the agreements they make. If you have any better suggestions than blaming those responsible for the situation I’m willing to listen and maybe even change my mind.
Is it more unrealistic than “we” deciding to change and find a better path forward than surrendering our digital lives to strangers? I’m able to self-host my own push server. I wasn’t born with that knowledge. I had to invest time, effort and energy to gain the knowledge and skills. If I can, so can others. I am not an extraordinary smart person.
Still, long before one starts to self-host entire platforms like NTFY or Nextcloud Push, there’s a ton of free to use services ran by idealists rather than capitalists. Or payed options with good terms. There’s so much between just not caring and being ones own sysadmin that I don’t think “don’t have the time” is a valid excuse anymore. It’s not just push messages, it’s everything - as you point out:
Sure. And most people I offered a free Nextcloud account to said the same. And Mastodon/Friendica-accounts. And so on. It’s like a technological mass depression, we can’t do everything we need to so there’s no point doing anything at all.
And today I’m running a custom ROM and no push services from Big Data while they’re literally getting robbed of their phonebooks by Meta.
“If you haven’t chosen to be a subsistence farmer, every problem with Big Agriculture is entirely your fault.”
More like the super healthy farmer is handing out organic food for free but people rather eat at McDonalds because it’s nearly packed and that’s where most people eat.
Lol you’re dreaming if you think even 0.1% of people will be interested in setting up their own server.
They’re also dreaming if they think doing these things doesn’t just make them stand out, and provides them any real protection from state actors.
The number one rule of tradecraft is to blend in. I promise that you haven’t thought of some way of using an always connected smartphone that the NSA hasn’t considered. They are probably the ones making your degoogled ROMs.
This is hubris, plain and simple. If your goal is to hide from state actors then the best way of doing that is to be uninteresting statistical noise.
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Most “standard” messaging apps (that includes signal, telegram) use the “OS provided” push service. On Android, they use firebase cloud messaging, a component of google play services.
Degoogled Android means not having any notifications, unless the app supports UnifiedPush, runs in the background 24/7 (which drains battery), or runs in the background occasionally (which delays notifications).
If the app runs in the background occasionaly, you can “burden” the people on the other side by being slow to respond.
Eh, I use a few apps that have true foss forks and thus don’t use gcm but the keep-alive method, and I didn’t notice a difference in battery when I made the switch.
Also lol #3 isn’t exactly a “burden”, take the hint and go away people. Let me live in blissful solitude.
Pretty much my experience with pull-based notifications. I’ve even tested the same client on the same setup against both NTFY and client-pull without seeing a noticable difference in battery usage.
It also means you will be on a very short list of people who use Unified Push.
Well I’d say those going the degoogle route learn about things like Unified, NLP, etc, along the way. But it is something the end user has to handle themselves, rather than it just being there in the OS.
That’s why I bothered to set up a nixOS config to deploy a docker cluster… I’m planning to give my friends and family a USB that connects to a private shared VPN, so all I have to do is walk them through booting from it
We all get a way to back up stuff with redundancy, and I’ll throw up a Jellyfish server, maybe set up some llm assistants to scrape the web for interesting news and put it in a Lemmy instance or something. These are all things I want for myself, and I am willing to configure it exactly once… At that point, might a well let people I trust join the cluster.
Even my technical family used to scoff and ask why bother… This last week when my sister called and asked what I was up to, instead of explaining that it’s more than just targeted ads, I asked if they noticed that everything sucks way more lately.
They never used to listen before… I think that’s changing. I think it’s time to build out alternatives
It’s not so difficult actually. If you already use Conversations from F-Droid you can use your XMPP address to receive push notifications for example.
Let me just tell my dad next time he can find the Skype icon on his taskbar so I can call him.
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Yeah, I was a believer of Linux on the desktop back in 2003-2005, but there’s no way I could have converted my dad.
Which is why I don’t update machines till they die. If it works, don’t mess with it.
I’m so tired of MS moving stuff around.
While you aint wrong… good thing about old people is that they die off and younger people are more likely to take these concerns seriously.
We don’t need boomers converted but rather current generations who will have to suffer under this regime, they got skin in the game.
Boomers are parasites that will sell anything out for 401ks and mcmansions, can’t expect anything “civic” out of such creature.
This isn’t just old people, tech illiteracy is high even among young people. Getting the average user to host their own server, for anything, is a pipe dream.
Well we should just give up now then!
Lol.
Is there a self-hosted alternative to SMS push? That’s my main push notification, I can’t think of another “service” I use on my phone. I’m an edge case though, already degoogled and don’t let much push to me. SMS is a necessity for work and personal.
Hell, SMS is clear text, no need to get the notifications.
This issue is about the notifications for (supposedly) encrypted chat apps hat use Apples notification service (and Google’s) such as iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
iMessage is supposed to be encrypted? I had no idea.