Having worked at an independent PC repair shop, there are a lot of people who would rather keep using their old 6+ year old laptops and have SSDs installed in them than go out and buy a new laptop. Yeah there are cheap ones for sale, but they're underpowered, have regular old HDDs, and only 4GB of RAM. Plus, now they're coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, which will annoy a lot of people who are used to Windows 7 or 10.
Indeed, after pacman and yay I'm never going back to Debian-based systems for personal use. The Arch User Repository is so much more hassle-free than trying to install stuff on Debian from 3rd-party repos.
Toyota owns 20% of Subaru, and Subaru is also invested in Toyota. From what I understand being an affiliate in the Toyota Group is not remotely the same as them being a sub brand of Toyota.
This is not a case of the OS subverting it's user, the user is installing Riot's anticheat of their own will. If you'd like Windows Defender to stop that, then you should be fine with the warnings it gives with those other apps too.
The difference though is that verification through phone numbers relies on money that you've already spent, which is a lot more reasonable for the majority of users. People would still be unhappy if they had to pay 5 bucks if they didn't own a phone.
If they want to boycott them, they can go ahead, but I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now and I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC (which in my personal opinion is inferior and a relic of the past) just because they don't like Discord or non-free software.
And it doesn't matter if you can't archive or return to stuff if you're putting important stuff on Github Issues or something and using Discord for the rest.
Yeah, they definitely need to do better, but forums can have the same phone verification requirements, it's not really a negative of Discord compared to forums in my opinion
Any alternative would have to be inconvenient by design in order to work though, that's why phone numbers are used in the first place.
An effective verification system usually involves money at the root; verification in the style of phone verification works using proof of ownership of a limited resource, and most limited resources cost money (phone numbers, IPv4 addresses, etc).
In the real world this is analogous to charging money for access to an event purely in order to ensure it's not overrun with attendees,improving the experience for people who care enough to pay to get in. There are similar downsides to this; people who don't have money are left out.
I have seen Discord servers that use 3rd party verification systems, but very rarely. An alternative to phone numbers would be ideal, but there will always be flaws similar to the flaws of phone verification in my opinion.
Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed verification method. Something better needs to be created, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same or different flaws.
Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who's been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone verification stops someone from raiding a server with it enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the whole purpose of phone verification.
Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to require phone verification is a good thing. It's not mandatory and it's only used if the server admin enables it. I don't think it's fair to blame Discord when it's a choice made by the server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.
I find googling for existing answers on forums, StackOverflow and Reddit to be great resources when I need to solve a problem, but I really dislike asking questions myself on those kind of platforms. I hate having to write a formal post and then hope someone responds, and then if anyone responds the conversation slowly crawls along post by post.
When I need help, I greatly prefer more casual, real time environments like Discord.
To me, asking on forums feels like posting a newspaper ad for help and hoping someone mails me a letter, compared to asking on Discord feeling like walking into a room of knowledgeable people and discussing my question face to face.
Which is why I use a custom domain with a paid Google Workspace subscription, if Google ever decides to lock my account, I can just change my DNS and go back to Fastmail.
Fair enough. A big part I didn't mention was the desire to deprecate my old @gmail.com addresses while still having access to Google services, and as much as some of the redesigns have bothered me, I still prefer Gmail's Web UI over other providers.
At this point I've sort of just accepted that in this day and age, surveillance is inevitable and past a certain point, trying to maintain my privacy comes at a huge cost in terms of convenience that I'm not willing to pay. I certainly value my privacy but at the end of the day it's a balance for me. I'd rather put the effort into making sure I'm not so tied to a specific platform that getting cut off would be devastating, which is why I've been working on moving stuff over from old Gmail accounts to my Google Workspace account with my custom domain.
They're a much larger company with massive infrastructure that dwarfs Fastmail's? The traffic Fastmail is accustomed to dealing with is likely nowhere near the amount of the traffic that Google deals with.
Fastmail was pretty good while I was a customer, but this sort of thing is partially why I switched to Google Workspace. Google might be terrible for privacy but at least I can trust them to not get hacked or knocked offline. If they ever decide to randomly lock my account or anything I can always just point my domain back at Fastmail. Good luck to them and hopefully they'll be back online soon!
I really don't understand people who are 'disappointed' with anything that uses Electron. Sure, it's not as performant as a native app, but writing and maintaining a different native app for every platform you wish to target, and then keeping their UIs united, is unreasonable for most people.
I'd be more disappointed if they didn't use Electron.
I'm with Start.ca, they're similar to Teksavvy in that they lease Rogers' cable lines. They're not doing CGNAT and I believe the CEO, who's very active on DSLReports, has confirmed they have no plans to start doing it.
> advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo
The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking. Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
For the average person who isn't as concerned about privacy, Discord is absolutely light years ahead. Personally, I don't mind that Discord doesn't have E2EE or self hosted servers, I think having those would severely degrade the experience. Discord works so well because it's unified and /I don't have to screw around with somebody's poorly self-hosted server on their rural internet. If I want to send top secret messages to people I'll just use Signal.
I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.
A lot of the ease of using Discord comes from the fact that every server just works, and you can join using a link. If people could host their own servers I'd imagine you'd end up with poorly-hosted servers that would degrade the overall experience.