I get the sentiment,
however when the user base of a FOSS alternative grows beyond the closed source alternative, a switch can happen.

So it would be a good thing to have a FOSS alternative out there, which can accumulate a user base over time.

Without any alternatives being developed,
a switch can never happen.

Raccoon thoughts:
Nooo muh grapes! D:
…
Well guess you really want some,
fine you can have that one.

Hi OP, I do the same thing during winters.

For XMR,
you can increase the profits a bit with XmrVsBeast + Gupaxx

• https://xmrvsbeast.com/p2pool/
• https://github.com/Cyrix126/gupaxx

I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”

YouTube has been cracking down on alternative frontends.

Vanilla Invidious currently doesn’t work well,
so most hosters paused and/or gave up.

Fijxu runs a fork of Invidious,
with their own modifications implemented to circumvent the blocks,
here’s the source code if you’re interested:
https://git.nadeko.net/Fijxu/invidious

I’ve got big respect for Fijxu,
he’s been doing a very good job of keeping Invidious alive + fighting against the YouTube crackdown lately, basically all on his own.

If you can please consider:

• Donating for their work/hosting
• Hosting their fork on your own
• Solving open issues with pull requests to their fork

All the above can help Fijxu,
since currently he’s mostly fighting a big tech giant all on his own.

OP I appreciate the reasoning.
But I’d advise against it,
and would recommend users to delete their Facebook account asap.

Why? 4-5 years ago I already noticed the “illusion of free speech” on Facebook.

The platform is a data farm,
but I’m a data privacy advocate,
so I regularly posted data privacy articles/tools.

Which went against the best interest of Facebook, so they simply held back that content from nearly everyone’s feed, resulting in it getting nearly zero attention.

But if I posted a dumb meme,
it would get a lot of attention.

I’ve asked around to friends back in the day who where scrolling online if they saw my data privacy posts, none did.

So staying on the platform to advertise things that go against Facebooks best interest, will likely not yield good results.

However deleting your account,
is a great conversation starter that can easily be directed into WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing, to teach your friends and family about Fediverse tools.

That’s nice and all,
but when will they tackle loot boxes?

That shit has pushed plenty of minors into gambling addictions, but they don’t crack down on it, since they get a sweet cut of it all.

Valve in general isn’t the worst company,
but they’re far from innocent as well.

For those that don’t know:
It was a jump-scare flash game.

The goal was to navigate through the maze with your mouse, without touching the walls, which gets harder near the end, likely resulting in you getting closer to and concentrating hard on the screen.

Near the end they flashed a horror image and blasted a loud sound through your speakers.

Personally, it didn’t make me flinch much though,
but I guess it affected some others like OP.

Yes Fediverse software can challenge the tech giants,
but we can and must expect them to fight against it as soon as it gets on their radar!

They’ll likely will attempt to do so by:

• Censorship: Keeping it out of the feeds/search results of their users.
• Propaganda: Putting it in a bad spotlight (e.g. marking it as security risks on their own platforms).
• Direct Attacks: E.g. DDoS attacks and/or bot user networks spreading bad content on the Fediverse platforms.

We should already try to harness ourselves against the direct attacks.
And help with spreading Fediverse software through WOM (Word-Of-Mouth) marketing,
since the tech giants certainly will not help it spread themselves.

The Fediverse is one of the few sparks of hope I have remaining lately,
let us ignite these sparks together into something bright!

Ahhh sad to hear, but thanks for your reply,
now I know that I can stop searching,
and start hoping for quick implementation of Wireguard config support for Netbird :)

Thanks for your suggestion, but after going through the Github issues,
I’m afraid that it’s not possible yet to connect to Netbird using a Wireguard config file:

• https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/2504
• https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/2627

I believe Briar currently is one of the best options out there, together with SimpleX.

However I lack usage experience with both.
Since no one I know makes use of them…

It was already hard enough to convince only a handful of my friends to start using Session and Matrix/Element (which are not the best options anymore), but I’m kinda doubtful about my success rate of making them switch once again…

My success with convincing people to use Telegram has been better though, since that’s the most commonly known, but nearly no one wants to install an app they never heard off before, just to chat with only me :P

Also “convincing people” lately goes smth like this for me:

• Do you have WhatsApp or Messenger so I can send you some pictures?
• No I don’t use apps that do not respect my privacy, but you can send em to me through SimpleX, Briar, Session, Matrix/Element, Telegram, Discord or email :P
• Upon which most choose Telegram or Discord as their means to contact me, sadly no one had Briar/SimpleX yet.

*Don’t Use Session,
if your threat profile includes government’s spending ±100k to crack your encryption, since their encryption is not the best out there.

Which they likely won’t for an average privacy conscious user, but they might for high ranking criminals.

It was a good read though,
I won’t invite new people to Session due to it.

But the title is a little click-baity,
“Session’s encryption is not the best”,
would be a more honest title.

Thank you, those are some interesting/good use cases indeed!

What do you use it for?
I’ve had it for a while,
but ended up uninstalling it,
since I could not think of a good use case.

deleted by creator

Oh did not know that, sad to hear.

They did remove traffic to the old Yuzu domains though, which now are in the hands of Nintendo, used to monitor which users use emulators.

Do you have other suggestions for promising successor forks?

Suyu, it’s the continuation/fork of Yuzu:
https://suyu.dev/

Also Azahar, the continuation/fork of Citra:
https://azahar-emu.org/

There’s 2 parts to this:

• Android Auto app (on your phone)
• Android Auto Head Unit software (in your car)

Both of which are currently proprietary,
and would need to be written as FOSS from the ground up by reverse engineering the above 2, which would be a huge undertaking.

Also flashing custom Head Unit software to your car will be very hard, is not well documented, and likely will void your warranty, giving low incentive for developers to even attempt it :/

The best you can do right now is aa4mg (Android Auto 4 MicroG),
which at least allows to replace the proprietary Google Play services with a privacy respecting FOSS alternative and Android Auto’s dependencies with empty stub packages:
https://github.com/sn-00-x/aa4mg

Full disclosure,
I helped with writing aa4mg :)

This post assumes I actually want to waste my time on LLMs, I don’t.

And even worse, it assumes you want to use the remotely hosted spy-ware variant, not even the less bad, but still a waste of time local variant…