> The peace of mind knowing that my every move isn't tracked and being used to sell me stuff or engagement bait

Why would you trust Meta to keep its promises?

Even Apple is not to be trusted with that, see, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

> this is the only connection left with lots of my friends now as we are scattered around the world

Time to suggest them to join Mastodon and Pixelfed? Relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is a bad way to keep contact with friends.

> Time to suggest them to join Mastodon and Pixelfed

Sure. Guess how many of them will actually do it?

> Relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is a bad way to keep contact with friends.

I'd say it's exactly the opposite: relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is currently the best way to keep contact with friends.

Unfortunately.

If I intentionally search for a "new car" or go to a page reviewing cars, then I give my consent to receive new information about it.

This is actually illegal under GDPR.

Mastodon and Matrix do rely on a single easy to target server.

What are you talking about? Which server? They are federated systems with many independent servers.

And if the federated server you are on goes down. You lose everything. If the federated server you are on steals your information or censors you there is nothing you can do.

You have to choose a server that you trust. In centralized systems, you have no choice at all. If you can't find a trusted server, you can set up your own, ask a friend to do it for you, or pay someone to do this job. You are not bound to an artificial monopoly.

I don't see what's missing in Matrix. Yes, the verification may be somewhat cumbersome, but I helped to deal with it, and it just works now.

A friend and I have been running a private Matrix server for almost a decade now, it's very lacking in comparison to what the average chat user (especially discord) is used to.

No custom emojis, no self-chat, embeds are inconsistent (e.g. encrypted rooms), multi-image uploads aren't a thing in many clients, adding text when sending an attachment isn't a thing, just to name things we've run into over the years. Most of these have been brought up to the devs many years ago, only to spend forever in spec hell and never actually make it into a release.

We're just tolerating these, because we explicitly moved off discord to have control over our data, but being tech savvy we can handle this. It's nowhere near good enough that I could use it with less savvy people.

Everything about matrix is cumbersome and glitchy. I have last tried to use it a few years ago and it seemed that Riot/Element had the only decent clients, and those were all Electron on desktop and also seemingly for profit. Signal has the electron problem, as well as many others (like the backup UI being abhorrent), but at least the core functionality works without fuss.

> and also seemingly for profit

They are not for profit, developed by the matrix.org foundation.

> Yes, the verification may be somewhat cumbersome

It's a hard blocker. I was running an engineering co-op off it and the onboarding difficulties was what finally led us to switch to discord.

All members are good engineers, but the client apps just had too many rough edges.

I really want the project to succeed so I'll keep checking in on it every year.

The real alternative is GNU/Linux phones.

Not if you can't run you bank's app on it and without bank's app you can't have bank account. Or interact with government. Or talk to your friends because of network effects around social networks.

I wish it were a real alternative, but it is not the world we live in.

You can run a bank app with Waydroid, and you can (and should) switch from a bank that forces you into the duopoly. I did. Many banks have an alternative authentication device, too.

This is called enshittification. Business behaves like with with the lack of regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

By which measure is the Google's free AI better than the one at DuckDuckGo? Happy user of the latter.

It should be illegal to mislead the users like this. The search terms weren't generic and didn't match anything.

> weren't quite as good

A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.