Ok, and that’s a well-thought out and respectable position. I wish you shared that level of insight from the start, but thank you. In principle I very much agree with you, actually.

And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your political activities (which includes your online comments and advocacy) are quite literally in that same paragraph lol

I do advocate for them. Not that I am obligated to prove it to you on any way, but here’s a link of me commenting on on Lemmy 8 months ago, in direct relation to First Nations peoples.

You can’t build good faith with people when you don’t give good faith arguments. Perhaps it’s worth contemplating if you’re really trying to change something in the world, or if you’re just frustrated and venting on the internet.

Either is fine, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Your comments lead me to believe you may be in the latter group.

It can be hard to discern facts from opinions nowadays because as you noted, so many people assert their opinions as fact. Especially online, and especially on modern social media.

It helps to find people and developers and communities that you trust, and compare their knowledge with whatever else you hear or read. This way, you might just be able to roam around just a little more peacefully knowing that you are secure in your understanding.

There’s a lot of noise on the internet, and much of it is unfortunately not worth engaging with.

Fight for what you believe in. I would be a hypocrite to tell you otherwise. I’m just saying, you’re not likely to win any support for a cause if you aren’t able to show people that they’ll be more accepted within a new system.

It’s fine to disagree on semantics or ideology but you need the people who are fed-up to be on your side if you want the numbers to create any sort of viable movement.

I get it, it’s frustrating, it’s slow, there’s infighting. It’s not to say your approach is wrong, just that the environment we were thrust into requires quite a bit more tolerance and understanding of those outside of your ideology, that is, if you want to do something more than argue with each other.

Use what you wanna use my man, but turning browsers into the equivalent of the ‘console wars’ that people get swept up in is a bit silly.

At the very least let me know why you think Firefox gargles balls in a bit more detail and how Brave by comparison refuses to gargle.

That would be a bit more insightful for us all!

I use Synology Drive for much of my stuff which backs up to my (really old) NAS. I also use cryptomator for some things. I also do a lot of manual backups because I made the habit and some things just aren’t easy or necessary to automate.

For the record, I know Synology sucks but I bought this NAS before they started pulling that BS about third party drives and removing codecs etc. I keep the NAS offline, tailscale only (sorry not doing Headscale). And for anyone in the same boat about the codecs, there’s a Github project I helped a tiny bit on which patches back in the old codecs and prevents synology from updating over it. If you want the link lemme know!

Edit: while I’m on the tangent of Synology I want to add that somebody came up with a script to activate many of the features which require device registration. All of it can be done offline and with no external scripts. Here it is!

Hey man, I appreciate the input but firstly I don’t see how the generation of people applies in this case in any meaningful way.

I can understand being frustrated with shitty aspects of the hyper-capitalistic society many of us live in and predatory nature of the modern free-market. But if you wanna make a difference please try expressing it in a way that encourages discussion and unity, rather than dissuade it.

Per your username, I’m all for socialist vibes. My wish is more of a transition into a true socialist democracy, which isn’t ‘pure’ socialism per se, but we’re on the same team. In fact, the working class is on the same team. But man, you’re not giving off socialist vibes imo, and that’s the opposite effect that your username implies.

Just my thoughts.

Dude I get it, I live too much of my life analyzing network traffic, blocking garbage in pi-hole. If I decide to trust, I still need to verify. Not trusting Brave, especially in its default config, is absolutely justified.

I’m happy to hear you appreciated it, thanks.

I get it, it’s hard to broach a controversial topic or a nuanced topic online sometimes without things exploding in your face.

Lemmy seems pretty decent for giving these topics a chance if you make a sincere case and you cover your bases.

Even still it’s not a guarantee. Honestly the most freeing advice (that I’m gonna give and that you didn’t ask for) is to speak your mind if you wanna speak your mind. Recognizing that we’re all different, that many arguments boil down to opinion, and that the up votes and down votes can’t affect you - it’s quite freeing.

Anyhow yeah I’d say use it if you wanna use it but I strongly recommend disabling all the shit that is there just to generate money at the very least.

I agree with you but just want to make sure you know that the mobile version currently only allows unlocking the origin features in the standard app rather than downloading a stripped down app, which is nearly equivalent to just disabling it manually.

So if you’re gonna get it, do it for the desktop versions and to support that practice like you said. I hope they’ll provide a way to download it through Obtanium or F-Droid in the future, but my gut says they’re not at that level of enlightenment haha. But I could be wrong, they did make the Linux version free and that was really unexpected to me!

And cause this is the internet, lemme warn you my Spidey senses are tingling about you calling it stripped Firefox. I get what you mean, obviously, but it’s the internet and even on Lemmy you’re not safe from nerd-retribution

That was quite literally my exact experience, like 100% exact.

So what I’m hoping at least is that they will release an Origin build for Android so we can truly have the stuff removed rather than just disabled.

It’s really kind of a shame, I tried so hard with Ironfox and eventually I noticed I just stopped opening it anymore, and that’s when I had to make a choice.

Yeah man stick to your principles and if you’ve been happy with it for so long then it would be silly for you to try it anyhow.

Them earning my trust was pretty unexpected for me as well. It’s a rare thing for me to 180 on something like I did.

Hopefully my trust is not misplaced. No doubt in my mind that they’ve permanently lost a huge subset of customers who would actually be very interested in what they’re doing otherwise.

I guess I’m of the mindset that even running this as a local model, it’s a waste of electricity. And the guy posted it on Github, inevitably some other fools will try it with cloud models, especially since it’s made the news. And obviously we know how bad the cloud models are.

And the difference I see between this and playing a videogame is that a videogame is doing something valuable - and yes I will argue with anyone who tells me that art and entertainment don’t hold real value - while this is just akin to running the AC when you go on vacation, it’s just wasteful no matter how I look at it.

Didn’t know that about the GDPR! That’s pretty interesting you’re right, haha. I wonder if they just don’t care to officially market in the EU. From my past limited business involving the EU it was a royal pain in the ass… I’m not complaining though, it’s just what you gotta comply with for the legal right to sell within it.

I’m not gonna run defense for the founder lol, you’ve got a reasonable position obviously.

That’s a big part of it for me as well. I know not everyone will find value in the anti-fingerprinting stuff but I personally do. And tbh I think the fact that they’re making the effort to actually develop rather than stick with the norm, which they could totally do, is pretty fucking cool.

Sometimes it’s a battle of lesser evils and the referee is reality. Although I’m no longer convinced the people behind brave are an evil, per se. Not everything can be as ideal as fully open source and free software while keeping up with the times.

For example, there’s a lot of encryption software out there that does the same thing as Veracrypt, but I choose Veracrypt every time because for my needs it exceeds the closed source competition and it works really fucking well.

So the pendulum swings to both sides.

The respect goes both ways!

You’re right that it’s not an engine, it’s a codebase. I probably shouldn’t have minced words there, it’s just that everyone knows Chromium but I don’t think most will know Blink.

Correction is appreciated. Ty!

That’s a point I should have expanded on more as well, getting new users to something is how you either help something flourish or kill it.

Gamers moving to Linux brought tons of people and motivated money. The kernel that is Linux has good people working on it so it’s improvements for everyone.

Brave seems, in my view, to be taking a sort of hybrid approach, where they’re still extracting value out of most people, but allowing the more tech-savvy people to disable the shit, or pay for a build of the browser that has that shit literally omitted from the codebase. I see that as a win for tech-saavy people, and not even necessarily at the huge expense of the non-savvy people because if they were gonna use a shit browser like Chrome before then they’re at least better off switching to something that natively blocks ads for them. Then the nerds can do what they do, and little Johnny can still browse for porn, but now he doesn’t have ads. And that’s all little Johnny ever wanted.

Yeah, totally fair. We’ve all got a line and that’s what I hoped to make clear in my post. I’m not pro-brave per se, I just happen to align with the path I see them taking with Origin.

If they go the Bambu Labs route or something, imma dip.

So Google is really clever and sneaky with their bullshit.

With Chromium they created this open standard that blew people away when it launched. If it performs better and has more features then why not use it right? Why not develop for Chromium too! So that’s what people did and continue to do.

But people are essentially building and using houses on a foundation that Google can and will and has changed on a whim. Google also makes their own houses on the foundation, but Google’s houses have fancy gold plated toilets. Now everyone wants gold plated toilets, after all, they’re all built on the same foundation right? But Google keeps their toilet making techniques a secret so nobody else can use them. And soon the value of the stupid ceramic toilet houses starts to fall and tenants move out.

A real world, recent example. Ad-blocking on Chrome worked just as well as Firefox for the longest time, until Google decided to change their extension system from Manifest v2 to Manifest v3. They introduced it with lots of nice improvements, but lo and behold that also happened to reduce functionality of adblockers. Every single developer now is forced to either bow down to their changes or try to make a fork which shoehorns support back in. But once they do that, it’s a ton of burden and maintenance for whatever developers took on the challenge, on top of that, you’re now fighting with upstream changes and instability. This is one example, they can do much worse and I’m sure they would if they weren’t terrified of an antitrust lawsuit.

Google is legit full of some of the sneakiest snakes I’ve ever seen.

Edit: I should point out that solutions are moving to another browser engine (Gecko is the most extensible), or using a Chromium fork that upkeeps their own system that’s equally as good. That’s part of why I am liking Brave, because they do have the money and resources to pour into building their own system despite the wrath of Google.

Oh and bonus is that the other home builders start to try appeasing Google in hopes that they’ll give them access to those shiny gold toilets.