After a recent forced update, I can no longer login to my bank account, the app brings up google play and expects me to login to gplay for what ever reason,I am not logged into that cancer on my phone, so now I am fuming and don't want to be forced to make a google account on the phone. (by the way I have been using aurora to avoid gplay)

I am hoping someone has a some trick or app to bypass this ? I have talked to the bank but there is nothing they can do for just one weird customer !

Everything is going to shit in this dystopian technocracy

Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.

This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.

Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?

#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse

A video I highly recommend you all to watch about the death of the open internet. this was posted on a peertube instance. I hope this won't be taken down just because it is a video format

TLDR: I uploaded a video to youtube but youtube's trained AI script kept avoiding picking a thumbnail I emebeded in the video no matter all tricks and changes I made to it. prompting me to deleted the video instead of sharing my phone number for the privilege of uploading a custom thumbnail.

First time trying to upload anything to youtube I knew that my effort will be wasted but I went with it none-the-less. I had spent two days recording a tutorial and hopping for a small view count, now I must say that I have dealt with google services in the past and my disappointment with them was unwatchable so I kinda had a previous taste of that.

I uploaded the video and worked on the thumbnail to only find out that I can't add the thumbnail without adding my phone number to the account. I was hesitant considering I care about my privacy but also wasn't sure if it was worth it, considering I didn't have high hopes for the channel. so I was given the choice of three thumbnails, one screenshot at the beginning one at the middle and the last one at the end of the video.

so I thought why no take advantage of that and re-encode the video with the thumbnail at the start and have youtube's script pick that. guest what ? I re-rendered the video six times changing the placement and length of display of the thumbnail at the beginning of the video. trying to animate the elements of the thumbnail and all sorts of tricks and nothing worked, youtube kept changing the time at which they picked the thumbnail and kept moving it further to the middle of the video all of this just so you can never post a video thumbnail without sharing your phone number.

I knew they were vicious but not to the point of allocating resources and training AI on these sorts of shenanigans. I miss those times when we had workarounds for every thing.

give your estimation in percentages !

Are you guys fine with these new shenanigans from Github. I found a bug and wanted to check what has been the development on that, only to find out most of the discussion was hidden by github and requesting me to sign-in to view it.

It threw me straight back to when Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure, now microsoft is exploiting free work from the community to train its AI, and building walls around its product, are open source contributors fine with that ?

Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through

I know that lemmy's moto is if you don't like it here make your own, but for communities with big sub numbers and where current event discussions happens. banning controversial political opinions is not what I would have expected from the fediverse after having left corporate media, which could be excused for having to answer to investors and what not!

After I got a comment banned for what I think is nothing else but controversial, where it received quite the same amount of upvotes and downvotes, I took a look at that community's mod log, and there is nothing to be cheerful about. the same reddit mods have made it to the fediverse and are trying to turn it into the same hive mind other social media are, it is a shame it is turning out to this.

Hi, I have noticed for three days now not being able to post comments from my Lemmy.world account while connected via Tor (I was left waiting for a spinning wheel )! I thought at first It might be a problem with LW servers but after three days, I concluded they are banning Tor and VPN users from posting, I Have found a user post on their help community about VPN and tor ban.

then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha. so I created this account hoping to test this instance and ask Lemmy users with privacy concerns about where this is headed and should we expect the rest of Lemmy instances to go the way of reddit and entirely ban users behind proxies ?

The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning. and adopting tactics like shadow banning and dark patterns is concerning as well. I dropped reddit for the same practices and I will drop Lemmy if it carries on like this.