Thanks for the warning 🙂 Sometimes I still think I have as much spare time as 10 years ago 😉

This got mee googling Nextcloud and I think I’m going to give it a try 😱

And then, they, would have our gratitude.

I’m still on Twitter (X) and I don’t have a problem with seeing Netflix-ads in my feed. I somewhat have a problem with a product like Twitter being bought by one person. If that could have been prevented in the first place, a tweet from one person would not jeopardize the monetization or engagement of that platform.

When Twitter was Twitter the same concerns were outed. Now X is Twitter minus 80% of its employees. From an economic standpoint it seems that investing in moderation doesn’t give you less concerns and complaints from the outside regarding disinformation, more extreme content, … . The advertisers have the most impact, I think. Together with the users that will look for an alternative.

Oh, luckily I’ve never experienced problems. I just wanted to point out that the appeal of Firefox for me was the appeal of being able to tinker with it and create my own custom experience. But not being able to, with confidence, verify the safety of plug-ins that I used or things that I tried out, I just stopped doing these things. And because I stopped tinkering with the browser, I used Firefox less and less. I had the same feeling with using custom ROMs for Android phones. So definitely not anything wrong with Firefox. It’s not Firefox that changed, I changed.

In my younger days I used Firefox as me default browser on Windows. It was fun to tinker with. The add-ons were especially interesting. Things like greasemonkey let you lay over a custom script over the websites you visited. But when I started to concern myself about the security of all this tinkering, I stopped with running script that a very sympathetic Russian kid had created. So at that time I switched to Google Chrome and now I’m using Edge Chromium.

Last Week Tonight, on the other hand, I still find and satire and informative.

I didn’t want to go into it too much but in Belgium there isn’t a political with more than 25% representation. So each government has to be a coalition of several political parties. There isn’t a system where the winner takes it all. A voter in Belgium doesn’t identify itself with one party for life. So we often switch between political parties. Here’s no ‘us against them’ culture. And because the outrage against other political parties isn’t a thing, it also isn’t a daily thing in the media.

Being from Belgium, following American politics started for me together with the rise of YouTube and I could watch episodes of The Daily Show on it and where things have gone from topics like ‘Dick Cheney shot someone in the face’ to news like this. It really made me stop watching talkshows that I really enjoyed like The Daily Show, The Late Show with SC, … . It’s so much politics, every day again, on so many television shows. Is it also perceived as such in the USA itself? In Belgium, for many reasons, politics isn’t 24/7 discussed everywhere, everytime.

I started several years ago with the YouTube Premium family plan. It gave me:

• YouTube Originals
• YouTube Music
• No ads
• Background playing

My kids are fine with it. It saves me and them a Spotify subscription. Having YouTube Originals disappear somewhat, lessened the value for me. Once the kids are not under my roof anymore, I’ll have to rethink this subscription plan. But that will be in eight years, or so. In that time so much will change, it’s not even worth thinking about it.

I used to play around with a lot of internet browsers and executed on top of that scripts in greasemonkey, add-ons, plug-ins, … . But the trustworthiness of these things were not clear for me anymore. So now I’m at using Edge Chromium. Better the devil you know 🙂

I’m not waiting to see Twitter fail. I’m just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream. And I must say that I’m happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.

I have both a Lemmy and Mastodon account besides my Twitter and Reddit account. Every person and channel I follow on both Twitter and Reddit, I immediately follow on Lemmy and Mastodon once they have an account and channel over there. But it’s all about content and interaction. Keeping track of the Ukraine war, for instance, was difficult on Mastodon. But posting on Mastodon was a much nicer experience in regard to interaction with members over there.