Sphere

Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.

Surprised it’s not zero already honestly.

Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.

I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.

Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn’t exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It’s completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don’t respect your privacy. Remember, there’s always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.

I think what’s likely to happen isn’t that we’ll see one replacement for YouTube, but a large number of niche and possibly subscription based or peer to peer sites that collectively end up offering everything of value that YouTube does/used to.

And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.

Handing it to LibreOffice or Abiword I guess. Or for cloud fans, Google Docs. I don’t think anyone is going to go without a word processor because of this.

Interesting for the alternative OS options - a device like this one would be great if there were some really good serviceable Linux distro for phones … And yes, I know they exist, but they’re not up to the level needed by most people for a daily driver. As for Android, it’s a nice idea to have a phone that lasts that long, but would it actually be reliable and fast enough to use for 8 years?

Sadly, no option to get this in Australia besides grey import, which is going to be pricey. I’m going to keep an eye on the way this line of phones goes in future, but for me at the moment there are too many unknowns and the price tag is too high.