Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store
twitter.comSo we got notified by the developer console at 21:45 UTC that the app had been suspended, but still haven’t had an email to explain why - it’s 02:24 now.
Our assumption that this is due to someone reporting abusive content in Matrix to Google, and Element catching the blame — although this is currently speculation.
To be clear: Element is a Matrix client just as Chrome is a Web browser, and just as it’s possible to view abusive material via Chrome, the same is true of Element.
However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (and other Matrix servers the core team maintains) we have a fairly strict terms of use at https://matrix.org/legal/terms-and-conditions#6-play-nice-cl... which we proactively enforce. Meanwhile we have a comprehensive toolset at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation to help folks moderate, and are making good process with decentralised reputation to empower users and admins to filter out stuff they don’t want to see, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix....
So, it’s very unfortunate and frustrating that we’re in this position - hopefully Google will explain what’s going on shortly.
UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it's not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked up for life.
We spent today doing an audit by revisiting recent issues reported to abuse@matrix.org, which had already identified and acted on the content in question. We also took the opportunity to explain how Element and Matrix fit together, what decentralisation is, and the steps we take to mitigate abuse on the servers we run.
As a result, it looks like the app has just been reinstated while I was typing this message: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app.
Thanks everyone for your patience and support while we sorted this out (and huge thanks to the overall Element team who spent their Saturdays on the audit).
But I can visit sites and do things in chrome that will get me locked up for life as well yet it's still on my phone.
You could also load the webbased element client in Chrome and use Matrix in Chrome. In theory at least, not sure how it holds up on mobile but you can definitely use it in Chrome desktop browser.
https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login works on mobile. It's their experimental light-weight web client.
Element, the matrix protocol, and matrix.org are all tightly linked together. Matrix.org is the default server in Element. With them so interconnected, I understand why matrix.org issues would affect Element.
Not that tightly linked. Whilst the Element client does offer Matrix.org as a signup/login as the first page you see, you're also just one single click from signup/login to any of the other servers. Nothing about that page really feels locked or branded to matrix.org.
I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account page. Does that mean that Mozilla is suddenly responsible for all emails (like spam) coming out of gandi?
New Vector leadership holding key decision-making positions on both Element and Matrix.org could be seen as a distinguishing factor. It feels subjectively like more entanglement than the Mozilla/Gandi combo.
We’ve very consciously tried to separate The Matrix.org Foundation from Element (previously known as New Vector), despite both Matrix and Element being created by the same leadership (myself, my co-founder Amandine, and the rest of the core Matrix team). To be clear: we started Matrix in 2014 as a pure R&D project, and then created Element (then NV) in 2017 to keep the core team employed to work on it fulltime.
However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue.
As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.
But can you host content with chrome that will get you locked up for life? Because that's the issue here: the official default home server was serving that content. Now, yeah, decentralization but apparently the people handling abuse reports of stuff in the play store don't know what this means, hence GP saying they explained what decentralization is and the relation between Element (open source project) and Matrix.org (the 'offending' service).
I think this is the problem, if you treat every client as a host it becomes the client’s responsibility to police the host which is wrong.
Wait until Firefox gets taken down for the same reason and chrome starts blocking things
A better analogy might be your ISP blocking google.com because of heinous content visible on the search screen. Yeah it would be weird, but I doubt anybody would have a real problem with that happening.
Thank you for all your efforts. The way you appear to have handled google's unjustifiable action is really impressive. Clearly that's one of the main reasons to be optimistic that matrix has a bright future - if I was in charge it certainly wouldn't. Due to incidents like this I simply ditched google completely. (OK, to be honest I sometimes watch videos on yt but without having an account.)
Challenges - like this google fiasco - really test the merit of a person and org...and you @Arathorn and the rest of the Element team as well as the Matrix org/Foundation team have shown to be really great stewards and leaders for Matrix, as well as great actors for open source and internet-at-large software. Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!! I've been a fanboy of matrix since the beginning (both the protocol and the teams building it), and it is behavior like yours and the related teams (incljuding all contributors!) that keep me as a fanboy for both the protocol stack and the software. Keep on truckin'!!! :-)
> Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!!
You're suggesting the challenge was created by Google and that so and so managed to navigate it successfully by obeying Google.
But we don't even know what the issue was. And if the issue isn't available to the general public through transparency or something like an FOIA request what is really being celebrated is the power of a corporation to control free speech over a protocol intended to wrest control of free speech back into the hands of people in the first place.
Limiting access to information such that it cannot be independently verified is far more sinister and nefarious — not to mention consitutionally unsound — than the threat of the bad actor sharing the info in the first place.
In the wake of the temporary Parler shutdown all of us need to be paying close attention to how we receive information. These things cannot be left up to anecdotal stories which delve into little to no detail.
Very happy for you guys. But do take this as a shot across the bow, if and when it serves Google's agenda to shut you down they will. You have a great service, don't let Google control you and be beholden to them.
We have put all of our eggs in the iOS and Android basket. It looks like this year we’ll see a few Linux phone come to market... can’t come soon enough
While it’s old now, the Nokia N9 proved to me a long time ago that the Linux phone idea has true merit. Harmattan was a brilliant UI!
I think you mean the N900, which I'd still be on if it did all the bands in my area. You're right though... probably the best Linux phone so far in terms of UI (I think the Ubuntu phone was too complex)
No, I mean the N9 :)
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9
I loved the N900 to, of course, but as a phone the N9 running MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan was superior day to day (for me anyway).
Ironically if they put the app on Huawei's AppGallery, it would have been up the whole time on a very non trivial amount of phones outside China where the AppGallery is preloaded before and after the Google ban.
Did your abuse team email the site that you removed from your home page, explaining your policies and telling them exactly why it was removed?
Did the VP offer any explanation as to why you had not received any communcation from Google?
this is still a joke you have to post on hn and hope to get high enough up to nastygram someone over 'my app connectsto the internet like yours' level of shit
Exactly. I'm happy that the app was reinstated, but this solves nothing in the long run.
> We don't want to go into specifics
This kind of language is very wishy-washy and leaves everything to the imagination. 9/10 times the issue is terrorism or CP. So which of the two was it? And why aren't you comfortable enough to share that reason with your prospective users?
Why should the details of the Matrix.org server moderation be of significance to Element users? We are talking about a decentralized and optionally end to end encrypted chat client.
Anyway, Matrix.org is hosted by a foundation with an independent board. You can ask them if you want but given your post you already know full well why they are not sharing. No one is going to do a press release to say they were involuntary hosting CP or helping terrorists. What good would come out of it?
Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.
I’ve had to deal with a situation once where a user received spam containing links to CP via a major IRC network. Weeks of paperwork and trouble, caused by a few seconds of work for the spammer. Spammers abuse this imbalance of work to easily take down services, many of which won’t ever come back online (I certainly won’t ever host free IRC bouncers again, it’s definitely not worth it).
This is what truly destroyed the open, federated web: humans being disgusting animals.
CP is a very touchy subject. But if we really wanted to solve the problem we shouldn't focus on someone accidentally seeing (and thus caching) CP on their device.
CP should be removed at the source, by doing everything we can to take care of kids and preventing abuse and related photography. And CP trading rings should be busted.
But individual pedophiles should be helped with their mental health issues before they act and become pederasts. The subject is so toxic that nobody dares go to a therapist with their issues. There was a recent documentary about it: https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d...
Coming back to crypto. Who cares if the images are shared using crypto or on paper or on usb sticks? Once you find a pederast, law enforcement should convince (without torture or similar tricks, offering therapy and help will probably be more effective) them to help expose their network. Same with any activity that is using encrypted communications: https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_2...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/can-child... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299657027_Non-Offen... According to Dr. James Cantor (a world leading pedophilia expert), and The Atlantic here, child sex dolls may be able to serve as an outlet to prevent pedophiles from acting out on their desires.
If it was encrypted, it wouldn't have been discovered in the first place. At least, not by google app reviewers.
You can take screenshots of encrypted content and the whole aspect of encryption is basically defeated if the channel itself is open to the public. This might not have been the case here, but there are people that infiltrate channels like this on purpose to report them to authorities and Google(?).
Why the lack of transparency about exactly what content triggered this response?
> extremely abusive content
This phrasing suggests it was probably not even illegal to publish.
What if this content had been something that Google finds politically or commercially disfavorable to its interests, rather than something we would all think is intolerable? What if it _is_ like that?
To the extent Google can lock you up for life for being inconvenient for their business model, I suppose it could have been innocuous content.
Oh, wait. We’re still a decade away from that particular dystopia, so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks.
Wait, if CP and terrorist attacks are posted in the open, then what FBI wants to read in e2ee traffic?
> so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks.
It seems you guess wrong. The Element guy did not mention any illegality, which is what makes me suspicious.
I'm really upset that this happened to you folks, and it's scary, because incident could just as easily have happened to us at Zulip (or any other OSS app that connects to self-hosted servers!).
I expect we'll never get a useful explanation from Google for why this incident happened -- abuse teams, like fraud teams, are worried about the bad guys using the explanations to tune their tactics and so tend to never explain anything.
But the details of how Google screwed up here also don't matter. A sudden Friday night suspension of a popular, legitimate app is insane! That possibility shouldn't be in the flowchart.
I get that for malware/spam/etc., it's important to immediately suspend, but I don't understand why Google doesn't take more seriously the very negative harm caused by doing that to a legitimate app. Some notice and appeal opportunity should be required before suspending a popular app by a legitimate publisher.
I'm upset, and a bit scared, but I can't say I'm surprised. This sort of random/erroneous/arbitrary punishment without explanation happens all the time with Google and other major tech companies. And every app developer I've met has experienced _significant_ disruption to their app publishing efforts due arbitrary/random rejections by an Apple app store reviewer, and this has been the case for years, so we can pretty confident that the vendors won't improve unless they are forced to do so.
There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google/Apple app stores and the negative consequences for everyone else of their error-prone and ruthless enforcement processes.
> There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google/Apple app stores
The regularity oversight needs to address a different aspect: google is world-wide de-facto monopoly for people not owning an iPhone. At least for the most part of the freer world, China is different story.
Until Google is broken up or fair competition is not achieved, content regulation does not help. As a European I want to care about US regulation as much as about US tax laws: not at all. The US is not the world-regulator. We elect governments in Europe that have no power to do anything in this sector. I don't say Google should be forbidden in Europe, we are not China. But competition and more choice for users needs to be guaranteed by effective legislation, in practice that against Google and Apple.
> freer world
I guess that's sarcasm? I can't even eat a sandwich outside without fearing that it will be considered a picnic and get me arrested.
This principle should be applied to all sectors. Basically capitalism is still young and we didn't have situations in the past were small companies could consolidate indefinitely so that they can at some point get so big they have more money than some countries. I think there should be a cap that beyond certain point company will have to be divided, so we never get companies too big to fail and being able to afford buying law to suit them.
I’m somewhat certain that the east India company, the VOC etc., had wealth surpassing many countries by the time their consolidation activities reached their peak, though. This isn’t a new phenomenon I don’t think.
Yeah, but those companies were de facto monopolies created by their governments. When they no longer served their purposes, those governments stepped in, defanged them, and took over their operations. Those companies may have been larger in terms of net worth, but their relationship to government was fundamentally different.
This was more like a state sanctioned oligarchy, whereas this loophole kind of gives anyone a chance to start EIC if they find a niche, exploit and then expand. Beyond certain point you buy laws so that nobody else can copy your steps. Rinse and repeat. This should be stopped.
> But the details of how Google screwed up here
They didn't "screw up". Or rather, that's not the main problem. The problem is that Google has the power to block the main channel of distribution of a piece of software.
Now, it's true that you can "just" get Element elsewhere, but the effective user lock-in into a single-corporation-controlled download hub ("app store") - that's the problem. And Google has gotten that quite right... for itself.
Legitimate app yes, but was it actually popular? The cached copy of the Element store page says 100k installs, <2k reviews. Compare to e.g. Signal at 50M installs and 1.2M reviews. Or WhatsApp with 5B installs and 130M reviews.
This is in part because we had to replace the app in 2019, and also because it's not the only client for Matrix - many deployments are actually forks of Element (e.g. France's 5.5M user deployment of Tchap).
If you accept that (1) there is a substantial amount of mal-content that Google should censor, and (2) a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship, and that (3) client applications can be functionally part of a federated messaging platform while legally separate from it, then those client applications are fair game to be censored when they deliver mal-content.
Now I may disagree with parts those precepts in stronger or weaker forms, but it is disingenuous to claim that the client application is exactly as legitimate as a web browser just because the client application is legally but not functionally separate from the federated network.
While we're at it, should we ban email apps as well? And probably the Internet itself and go back to "safe" walled gardens like AOL, since there are almost certainly bad people on the net?
We try to rationalize this when it affects apps we don't use. But censorship is a very slippery slope. No single company should have this level of power. Browsers will be next. Solidarity is the only answer to abuses as such. Shade Freud always begets irony.
> should we ban email apps as well? And probably the Internet itself and go back to "safe" walled gardens like AOL
Huh? The AOL you're thinking of included an enormous cross-section of the population, with no controls on who could talk to who. If the Internet is unsafe, then so is AOL, because they're the same thing.
Right, that was the point. You can never get rid of "bad actors", and even if possible, that would have a myriad of unintended consequences (such as living under authoritarianism).
The irony in this case is that the speech that is attempted to be censored isn't even illegal. (at least in the U.S., where our liberal, cherished "anything goes" approach is enshrined in the Constitution.)
That's a textbook example of the logical fallacy commonly known as the slippery slope.
No it’s not — it’s pointing out that those arguments fail when looking at existing systems, and would trivially deny things that we know we want. A slippery slope would be that the reasoning lends itself to more extreme reasoning down the line. You don’t need to bother with that here, we’re already arguing from the bottom of the slope.
This simply argues that they’re special-casing against non-established systems — if you applied it uniformly, you’d trivially lose things you obviously want to keep.
That is, this is a stupid operation that is at best sponsored by “think of the children!” Mothers Against Everything foundation.
My assertion was a narrow one: the client application of a network designed to avoid censorship of bad actors is not exactly as legitimate as a web browser that is not designed to avoid censorship of bad actors.
To go from that narrow assertion to "ban email apps and probably the Internet itself" is fallacious reasoning at its finest.
There's no rebuttal by refuting any of the premises or finding logical flaws, just straight to the end of the world as we know it.
> the client application of a network designed to avoid censorship of bad actors
You didn’t argue this, and I’m not clear that matrix or similar technology makes any direct, intended or significant effort to do so beyond the much broader, all-encompassing goal of “let nothing be unavailable”. But if true, I might be more inclined to agree with you.
What you did argue is that
Which is wholly different, in that the usage is at fault, not the protocol in and of itself (in the same fashion that Bitcoin was not designed to facilitate drug trade, even if it’s a key use case driving its valuation).a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorshipBut we also know that illegal activity is a key use case of the internet, of email, of encryption and a wide variety of other decentralized and federated technologies. This is hardly a good justification because you’ll ban all sorts of good things.
The only thing that protects your argument against everything else is that you arbitrarily limit it to non-established technologies — in the name of all that is good and wholesome, you would kill anything like the internet, email, etc, that is not itself the existing technologies.
A web browser is only more legitimate because the internet is more broadly used. Which isn’t much of a case for legitimacy.
This event is a textbook example of the slope already being slippery.
By the way, “malcontent” (no hyphen) is an English word that doesn’t mean “bad content” or “malicious content” like you’re intending.
I guess my dictionary is wrong then sense it seems to be referring to a person in both definitions that they give.
That would presumably include Chrome and https and enabling use through VPNs?
The above are use daily for extremist content, CP, circumventing numerous national laws in numerous places...
Hard to draw the line.
The line isn't that hard to draw.
If you run a monolithic, centralized service specifically designed to avoid censorship, and you don't moderate what users do on your service, and some of those users hurt people with your service, then you should expect your service will be shut down as Parler was.
And if you do the same thing, but separate the front end from the back end, and have different entities run them to provide legal separation, while practically and functionally the result is identical to that of the monolithic centralized service and your system is used to hurt people, then you should also expect that whatever components can be deplatformed will be deplatformed.
Your litmus test of 'is used to hurt people' is completely true of web browsers and email too.
Emails are always coming up in court cases etc. as people regularly use them to organise or discuss criminal acts, and it is sometimes used with E2E encryption so nobody can intercept and police the contents. I'm not convinced you've drawn a clear line. When is a protocol client responsible for the content shared or accessed with it, and when is a client not responsible for it.
How do you logically reconcile that what you say applies to Web Browsers as well?
I just want to chat with my friends without spooks putting it into a permanent database to later be used out of context against me. A crazy, dangerous idea, I know.
It's amazing to see how far we've fallen - to be at ease with the idea that there can be no such thing as a private conversation, and therefore that any private conversation is by definition illegal.
Any crime should require an actual victim. Which means there is evidence of it happening. You don't need a permanent record of everyone's conversations to uncover such crimes, police just need to do the job which we pay them for, which is to investigate.
CP and terrorism are both disgusting, horrible things, but even those are not worth losing all our basic human freedoms over, or we won't be left with a lifestyle worth defending.
By that logic, web browsers are not functionally separate from the federated Web, so all browsers should be banned until they start blocking objectionable sites.
The future: "it's the Internet Jim, but not as we know it" -Spock
> (2) a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship
For some people (although maybe comparatively few) it's primarily about building a more robust Internet that works also if centralized service(s) disappear
> If you accept that (1) there is a substantial amount of content that Google should censor
Why would we accept this? We don't even accept the situation in which Google is _able_ to censor anything for the general public.
Why is this disingenuous? The web is decentralized in exactly the same way and browsers play exactly the same role of independent clients for accessing this decentralised network as do Matrix clients for the Matrix network.
I'm testing Element and Matrix at American Airlines.
There are big players with clout that take issue to instability such as this. How can I rely on my company using Element when it gets pulled? Not cool Google...
To the element team, reach out to me if you can't get the support you are looking for.
This comment alone should be reason enough for the company behind Element to sue Google.
Google may be able to control the Element app on the play store, but at least for the server side there's no way to do that with synapse (the official matrix protocol server side implementation), which is fully open source and distributed directly from the developers.
They are also working on a Go version called Dendrite - https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
The Matrix team is doing a LOT of cool stuff. :)
Yes, but IMO the Matrix team should _really_ focus on Dendrite since Synapse is extremely resource hungry and prevents a lot of people (including me) from running their own servers.
It's not that resource hungry anymore. Hovering stably around 500M RSS and 8% CPU for me right now. That's with ~25 users and a lot of federated, public rooms, some of them quite large.
What CPU are you running it on and how many cores are being used? Are you also in really large rooms like Techlore and Matrix HQ? Because I think I'm in all of the largest rooms (and a lot of the smaller ones)
I'm running my instance with lots of bridges in a 3-core 4GB server, paying about eight euros a month for it. Synapse runs just fine, but I'll probably switch to the Rust impl when it's done.
If you want to go cheaper and have only 300-400 Mbps of bandwidth, I've heard lots of good things about this provider:
Contabo is great: finally a provider that does not save on mem and disk space. I moved everything to them and I save tons of money. The 400mbps is only for the cheapest as well: you can pay more to get more. Not that most people would need more. Especially for running matrix for a company etc.
Not those two (and I know those are especially large), but we are in many 5-10k rooms, including bridged Freenode rooms which are known to be some of the worst offenders.
Note that many significant improvements have landed very recently, for instance the chain cover stuff which significantly improves handling of rooms with frequent membership changes (such as the aforementioned bridged IRC rooms).
8% CPU average actually sounds like a lot, unless your 25 users are chatting around the clock.
The federation is chatting around the clock. Remember, joining a Matrix room means that your server needs to handle all of the room's traffic. And 25 users can easily be in a lot of large rooms. However, each room only needs to be handled once, so if more of my users join a room in which my server is already participating, the cost doesn't increase.
That said, this isn't an average but a spot value. It frequently falls below 8% (though typically stays above 5%). Note that this is a cheap and relatively weak VPS.
I'm not saying Matrix is terribly lightweight. I'm saying you can easily run a small personal instance on a cheap machine without any performance problems.
If I run Weechat on my VPS, and join a few high-traffic IRC rooms, I expect my average CPU use to be 0%. Same if I run mailman with a few messages per minute, or an IRC server.
The fact that we can now run it on a VPS is an improvement, but it is still orders of magnitude heavier than equivalent non-decentralized systems.
How can you rely on the app/play store for any app? This suspension has nothing to do with element, it could have been any app.
Can't you just use a web app or any other matrix client if this happens?
If Google were to "ban" slack from their store, their browsers, etc. then you would be quite in trouble.
But with matrix, just pick a different client and move on.
Yes, I'm doing a custom react client integration. AA has to prepare for black swan events from every angle and this is a perfect example of one.
When you have 100,000+ employees, it's not trivial to just switch up communication platforms.
If you need to prepare for Black Swan events, doesn't it make sense to have your own channel to distribute APKs to all devices? Why would you rely on the Play Store at all?
that’s a lot of tooling to build for a single application—plus not everyone is tech savvy and installing from non-standard locations requires more user support
A 100K-sized company is going to have a BYOD or corporate device issuance program with tie-in to MDM, which effectively functions as a private appstore (the DPC (device policy controller) (itself an app) can silently install apps (as in, download APK from $anywhere, hand to PackageManager) without confirmation, etc).
MDM infra is big bu$ine$$, but DPCs are quite simple to write.
(Psst. They also let you read CPU usage on Android 7+ (sadly not per task, but at least with per-core granularity). The catch? Installing a DPC requires a factory reset. xD)
> A 100K-sized company is going to have a BYOD or corporate device issuance program
Some will, some might run a more open org, with a lot of rather independent contractors, focusing on providing services on standard platforms (email, chat, wiki, bugtracker etc).
Not every device is under MDM in a big corp. Often you have people like external consultants bringing their own devices, who need to participate in (semi-)internal communications. You cannot just MDM those and you cannot just issue bigcorp devices to them, so you need something like the normal appstore to distribute the software. Maybe you even have BYOD for internal people, so MDM could be hairy from a GDPR/employee rights/liability standpoint. And maybe you even have customers and partners who you want to communicate with, whom you have to provide with a viable option of communicating. You can (maybe) separate those into an internal and an external communication tool. But then you just have two different tools, one of which will have the exact same problem about needing installation via commonly available appstores.
It's easier to simply ensure that the apps you need are present in multiple stores.
I take your meaning, but pedantically I think the idea of black swan is that you couldn't ever see it coming, so the only way to prepare for it is some sort of general robustness (which to be fair Matrix does have).
Let each user pick among any of the multiple clients available. Don't design your system / process to only support one client.
It puts too much pressure on Helpdesk to provide the support needed when you don't have a common path.
This reality should be yelled by a death metal band singer 24/7 at every FOSS developer.
I laughed hard ... but actually no.
That should be yelled at every FOSS evangelist, those people who claim everywhere that no one needs Windows, because Linux has everything Windows has, just better, etc.
We FOSS developers are free to do what we want. Most of us develope mainly for pleasure, not to ease the workload of some corporate helpdesk.
I'm arguing against the hidden premise that "having a dozen different client thingies" is a potentially good thing for users. It nearly never is, and the fact that a dozen devs derived pleasure from creating them doesn't change that.
I'll go even further and claim that "user choice" is code for, "warning: nobody in this space is competent enough in UI/UX to derive pleasure from working on it." In fact in mastodon's design, it's not even code-- the "choice" of servers by topic is literally a limitation imposed on the user before even signing up. So the very first part of the UX has a circular dependency-- choose a server to try out the service and discover which server most suits your interests. It'd be like Google redesigning search so that you have to type subreddit-style topic into the URL before searching.
Additionally, this "choice" meme seems to conveniently disappear for software that has a thoughtful UI. I don't see anyone talking about the downside of Krita not having multiple other half-baked UI's than very impressive one it ships with.
There are debug version apks available here: https://buildkite.com/matrix-dot-org/element-android/builds/...
Click on "Assemble GPlay Debug version" (or "Assemble FDroid Debug version" if you don't have Google Play Services), then click on "Artifacts" and then choose your apk from there.
How is that a solution to the problem? Of course there's other ways to install software, just like you could build your own iOS app and sideload it with a certificate. If an app is gone from the store it's basically dead.
If I were to test the implementation of an app in my enterprise, then it would benefit me to cut down on the unnecessary dependencies. Being dependent on the Google Play Store has shown to be a liability in the past because there were moments where it became a single point of failure (as demonstrated in this thread)
Sorry for this :((
There are alternative clients: https://matrix.org/clients/
FluffyChat would be the main contender.
Big players with clout can commission their own closed access app. The C levels just need to take a $0.5M hit among themselves.
Reach out how? You have no public contact information in your HN profile.
We've already had conversations and I reached out personally.
That's why XMPP has been adopted for military and industrial use.
You can use FDroid though.
How are you going to explain that to your manager?
How does your manager explain to you that you must agree to TOS from Google to install apps necessary for your job?
In the explanation to a company I see nothing wrong. In the tendency to make employees agree to arbitrary ToSes, I see massive liability that should be dealt with using a massive class action lawsuit against some behemoth.
I actually think federated protocols are a get out of jail card for employers since making your job related to owning a car is reasonable, to owning a specific brand of car is not.
Hello employee,
We have a new corporate policy that removes your access to anything related to O365 by Date. The only way to remediate this issue is to install InTune and the corresponding corporate security office's profile so it can enforce our policy on the device. If you qualify for our corporate device program, we will cover the cost of the device and data plan.
Sincerely, CTO
Honestly, it's very common at the largest public corporations and most corporate r&d groups in the US. It's not like we don't already do black box development or have strict vpn only enforcement rules. I wonder how risk assessment sees these kind of federated protocols because in theory you are right about it reducing liability if they run the system.
You’re lucky if you work a place that even sends you an email when they make unilateral changes to the software that’s running on employer-owned hardware. Everywhere I’ve been has a management engine running with highest privileges that does whatever it wants, this used to be true only in industries like finance and healthcare but now it’s standard.
Maybe places like google are different, I would not know but I’d be surprised to learn that there’s any publicly traded company that does not exercise total control of their machines.
We received a generic update at 05:31 UTC confirming that the app had been suspended due to abusive content (Sexual Content and Profanity: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... ); we're following up to explain how Matrix and Element works and get this resolved.
This is probably not a coincidence or an oversight, but rather a "what can we get away with" attempt, similar to previous efforts to remove UBlock Origin.
But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
I'd personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]
This doesn't work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I'm trying to find the article...)
I also doubt that iMessage and What's App gaining "backdoors" to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.
At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.
"Abusive content" is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-...
> But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
There is an absolutely unprecedented shift going on as we speak, one of those groundswell events that have the potential to shift usage habits of hundreds of millions of people.
We got a taste just recently with the shift away from WhatsApp based on a TOS update. Imagine arguing last year that ten million users would jump ship based on a TOS change?
Matrix, and services of its ilk, are absolutely an existential threat to Google in the next 20 years.
Don’t forget that Google has all the threat intel you could possibly imagine from their existing analytics platforms. They will see the shift coming before anyone.
I can absolutely see them acting now to try to disrupt the initial rumblings of a seismic event that has the potential to go totally viral and popular sentiment shifts against megacorps.
Killing them gets exponentially harder over the next 6 months if there were a successful campaign across the internet to switch to these services, and 2021 is very close to seeing a very significant grassroots campaign like that truly take off. Certainly the time has never been better and the populace never been more primed to make the move out of the walled gardens.
Google has no (competitive) horse in the messenger race, so while that theory might fit your ideological point of view, I don’t understand why Google itself would have any incentive (or grounds) to remove an open source chat app.
How is Matrix a threat to Google?
Google counts up every minute users spend using their electronic devices.
In their world view, every single minute per day spent looking at screens that don’t have Google ad targeting is a minute that a competitor is stealing value from Google.
> How is Matrix a threat to Google?
A matrix user identity will eventually compete with a google account.
When google accounts are considered as important as myspace accounts, then much of their surveillance loses relevance.
> How is Matrix a threat to Google?
Conjecture on my part: it's a threat to the ad spend Google gets from Facebook.
Facebook (24%) and Google (32%) compete pretty intensely for mobile ad spend. While we don’t know how much Facebook uses Google ads, that theory isn’t particularly satisfying because they compete so intensely.
https://www.fastcompany.com/4032442/its-still-pi-day-so-we-d...
> Facebook (24%) and Google (32%) compete pretty intensely for mobile ad spend. While we don’t know how much Facebook uses Google ads, that theory isn’t particularly satisfying because they compete so intensely.
And yet...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
Discord, a huge chat software, is hosted on Google Cloud. This might help explain why they tried to kill Element, a client for Matrix, a competing chat software with similar targeted user base.
This seems like a classic case of Hanlon’s razor and I don’t see any evidence to the contrary (yet).
An NSL would be handled a lot differently than removing an app from a single app store for sexual content. Every indication so far points to it being a mistake by Google.
From less than a week ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/googles-bots-decide-...
Maybe.
But if you always discount such events as coincidences, you risk remaining blind to emerging patterns.
The pattern is that their reviewers are really bad and the appeal process is almost nonexistent. Improving the quality would probably be a huge cost and they have no real reason to do that.
Having a appearantly random blackbox system is handy when you want it to do shady stuff. Just blame the algorithm!
The app is back up and the Element folks agreed that there was what sounds like child pornography reachable from their domain. Overzealous automation perhaps, but obviously not a conspiracy.
Element is not Matrix.org.
You can view child porn on Chrome, or receive it by email, or download it by Torrent. Yet I don't see anyone banning web browsers, email clients, and Bittorrent client.
And the takedown was reversed. It is clear that Google now believes that the app is not in violation.
The point is that this is well explained by something other than conspiracy.
We've just published an official blog post updating on the situation at https://element.io/blog/element-on-google-play-store/ which we'll keep updated as things progress.
Did you think to maybe give your article a more self-explanatory title? It's harder to spread the message when the primary qualified source for this is titled "Element on Google Play Store" instead of maybe "Element (Matrix chat app) banned on Google Play Store".
updated.
Will Matrix respond to this by pointing out that F-Droid is a viable option for people intending to publish or use FOSS apps?
good point; have updated the blog post.
FYI, unless you're providing reproducible builds to F-Droid signed by your key (which doesn't seem to be the case), that APK is going to be signed with a different key. So it's either uninstallable over top of a Play Store-derived APK, or if someone does install it who doesn't currently have Element installed, they won't be able to install a Play Store-derived APK later – at least not without uninstalling first, and unless they do that with the right adb option, they'll lose any app data they have.
Ideally you could set up reproducible builds and make sure that the version in the default F-Droid repo stays up-to-date, but reproducible builds may not be practical for you right now (I'm not sure). Barring that, as you mentioned in the blog post, setting up your own F-Droid repo with self-signed APKs is a good option.
I haven't yet played with Matrix nearly as much as I would like, but I love the vision. Thanks for your efforts!
Also nice plug for F-Droid; they're doing good work as well.
> We're also looking into running our own F-Droid repository going forwards
That's great to hear as well.
i disagree. the main repository enforces reproducible builds and restricts trackers. please keep the main repo up to date.
Well, I disagree with your disagreement. Part of the value of F-Droid is that the main repository can host packages that are vetted and maintained by uninvolved parties. Second, if the Matrix-run repository does reproducible builds, then... there's no problem. (That's the nature of reproducible builds.) Third, F-Droid was conceived to be distributed and decentralized. That's why it allows you to add other sources in the first place, there's even a feature baked in that lets you get/share apps (including F-Droid itself) in-person with people around you, and under the hood the whole thing uses a DVCS-style model where the package index is "dead" data and your device manages a copy. Fourth, an app author choosing to run their own repository means that they're invested in F-Droid, moreso than instances where F-Droid's role is to achieve "mere availability" for the package.
What's more, this incident is evidence that we need more decentralization, not less. In instances where decentralization is either already working or is up for consideration, we should encourage it, not try to eradicate it.
If they provide reproducible builds there's also no need for a separate repository.
Can you explain your reasoning?
The main repository also signs everything with f-droid keys, not the original developer's. This means any compromise in f-droid compromises everything.
actually, it turns out this is no longer a limitation: https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
"Publishing signed binaries from elsewhere (e.g. the upstream developer) is now possible after verifying that they match ones built using a recipe. Publishing only takes place if there is a proper match."
sounds like a problem to solve. build in both places, verify build hashes agree, upstream dev infra signs and sends signed build to f-droid, f-droid verifies hash against its own build, verifies upstream signature, signs and then lists. apks can have more than one signature.
Kudos on the quality of this post, makes me feel like the project is in level-headed hands!
FYI, there's a typo in the updates at the bottom: Yesterday and today is referred to as being in 2020 rather than 2021.
This is insane. This jeopardizes every email, xmpp, matrix, etc; basically any 3rd party application.
Being suspended for user generated content has been a rite of passage for third party reddit clients. It's crazy how this happens again, again and again.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/96l0at/sync_for_re...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/6dwv1f/boost_for_r...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5fqrr8/now_for_red...
There is a significant difference there though: reddit is still a single, central entity. Matrix, XMPP, email, (and activitypub based systems, ssbc, and anything federated) could be connecting to one's own server. It could be a machine in my basement.
I don't see the difference. "Sync for reddit" a custom client for reddit. It was suspended for "hate speech". Then why isn't the official reddit app not suspended?
> I don't see the difference.
?
1. I install synapse (a matrix server) on my own machine. I install Element on my own phone. I connect one to another, and via the server to other servers.
2. I install a client that connects to reddit. Same reddit as everyone else. Same reddit as the reddit website.
There is a rather significant difference, isn't there?
EDIT addressing the 'hate speech' part, you are correct. If one reddit client is banned, all should be banned. But that is not true for communication apps, like Element.
> This jeopardizes every email, xmpp, matrix, etc; basically any 3rd party application.
Except of course Google's own applications. Gmail, Hangouts/Meet/whatever-it-currently-is, Chrome.
Luckily it's not possible to display illegal content with Google's own apps /s
I remember when my nephew got groomed on Google Plus, I was way to naive to think that this would not be occurring in Google's walled gardens. But in there, it turned out to be quasi-public.
>Luckily it's not possible to display illegal content with Google's own apps /s
Perhaps one day they will make this argument to justify having to spy on everything you do with their software.
> my nephew got groomed on Google Plus
That is genuinely horrifying and I'm so sorry for him and your family.
Don’t worry. Google will kill it’s own chat apps. Sad but true.
The app in question wasn't suspended for illegal content, it was suspended for profanity.
That's ridiculous on it's own. I mean... got out on the street and listen to how people talk.
I pointed this out not long ago. When will it comes to Email? How is mailing list any different?
And what about Chrome or Web Browser? Or they going to have built in Filter for website? Although without the reach of Google Search Engine having a filter or not makes no difference anyway.
But it is great they are doing it, the more the better. People were extremely supportive on HN not long ago about banning speeches they dont like on Internet. Hopefully they finally learned something here. They opened the Pandora Box and there is nothing anyone could do until the Pendulum swing to its limit before swinging back.
History repeats over and over again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597025
For all the chaos, the Internet continues to be surprisingly consistent with one set of rules for BigTech and friends and another set of rules for the rest.
It’s largely based on who has more lawyers. Google would never suspend Twitter because they would be instantly sued... like within 24 hours... and by a top tier law firm.
Update: from what I read, the reasoning can probably only effects systems where history is stored - slack, matrix, to name two. IRC most probably not, XMPP only if configured. Email: unlikely, it's a very different system.
All web browsers that are not Chrome, beware. You're next.
Those might be the exceptions, at least for now. Ever since Firefox's crusade against IE the majority of people seem to still know there are different ~programs~ apps to access the internet with. As long as Chrome is not the default in the overwhelming amount of the operating systems, this might even stay like this, which is why I'm extremely unhappy that Android ships with Chrome these days and not with a thin gui on top of the system webview, like it used to.
EDIT: this ties in to the conversation I had on different platform recently, that it's getting arduous to make people understand that an app is not necessarily the same as the system behind it. Choosing an email client used to be a thing (Thunderbird, The Bat!, Outlook Express, mutt, etc; to name some across contrasting needs) not even too long ago. I despise that we came to a world where even the tech moderation fails to understand an app != protocol.
> As long as Chrome is not the default in the overwhelming amount of the operating systems, this might even stay like this, which is why I'm extremely unhappy that Android ships with Chrome these days and not with a thin gui on top of the system webview, like it used to.
That is also why I was rather sad when Microsoft announced that they won't develop their own browser engines any more. I disliked IE as much as anybody else, but what I did like was the competition. With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome, part of that competition is gone.
> With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome
Now it sends half of your data to Google and the other half to Microsoft. That's an improvement, they decentralized spyware.
Its 75% each way. And they will for many years work to reduce spying by lowering this percentage, to 50% in the asymptotic case.
I would posit that Google has a vested interest in blurring the lines between apps and the protocols that drive them
I wonder why this hasn't been escalated to an anti-trust case yet.
They don't bust trusts anymore, but FAANG sure is determined to bust all our trust in them.
Wonder if we can get Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp off the Play store like this as well. "Side effects include: sexual content and coups."
No need to wonder. The Facebook and WhatsApp apps are why people buy phones. If a phone/platform can't run Facebook/WhatsApp, people will buy different ones that can.
You could if it were small apps.
Could this be related to all the WSB shenanigans going on? Banning their chat groups makes them move to another, repeat?
That would be absurd but compared to everything that happened in 2020, that could be very likely. A lot of $ billions are being lost which very well may impact a large amount of expectant people.
After Discord banned their server, they moved to Telegram and the chat currently has more than 100k members. They would've banned Telegram if they wanted to shut WSB down
> Google will explain what’s going on shortly
It's definitely not Google style.
But I hope Matrix will get more promotion in result.
I on the other hand hope that they won't just say "oops, our bad!", reinstate it and sweep the entire thing under the rug like nothing happened, without explaining anything.
There are people here who work on mobile applications. If they depend on Google and Apple delivering their app to their clients, it's still unacceptable that they can potentially put you out of business, just like that. I already saw a couple of people here that claimed it happened to them too. Without any reason, without the ability to appeal, nothing.
Newsflash: there is a chat system so secure, Google doesn't want you to know it exists.
I don't think that can be the full rationale behind whatever got it removed, if that were the case, they'd absolutely have removed Signal quite some time ago.
the difference is Signal is NOT federated, and matrix is. Which make it more like email, harder to censor.
Not necessarily, I run a non-federated synapse (matrix protocol) server for intranet type use. It's in an environment where it has no connection to the wider internet at all.
The default matrix.org servers are federated.
In terms of what the default Element install presents to the user upon launch in its GUI, I think it does offer the 'official' matrix.org servers as a place to create an account and sign in, start browsing 'rooms'.
Your users still benefit from less centralization. The main matrix.org instance might ban them for whatever reason, but their access to your internal server is not touched. It's different if all of you used Signal or Discord and their account got banned e.g. for using an alternative client.
Signal is open source you can run your own non-federated signal server. You can use a custom signal client against the federated network too.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq4k/thousands-of-users-un...
Signal Server has not seen updates for over 9 months. Moxie openly states that is not part of Signal's core values to support federation in the network.
IOW, even though they say they don't want to control your conversation, they do want you in their hands.
But. The point is still that you can run your own non-federated signal server or connect your own client to their federated network.
An outdated version of the server whose development team has no incentive whatsoever of supporting for your use case.
Can you run it? Sure. Should you?
Why does any source code exist then? What is the point of GitHub with codebases that are 7+ years old? Would mass adoption of the outdated server force updates or god forbid a fork of the code base?
Please excuse me for being direct, I do not accept your defeatist attitude on this one. You won’t have stickers, such a shame, but you would have the ability to create your own signal service
If Signal was the only alternative to have an internal messaging tool, sure, it would make sense to invest time and money on it to keep it up.
But it doesn't. There are options. If I had to choose, I would rather invest this time and money to collaborate on the existing protocols that do have the goal of being fully open. Matrix and XMPP can do the things that I want and there are plenty of people working on them to overcome the present issues and challenges for mass adoption.
Why should I swim upstream by myself if there is no special reward for this kind of effort?
Because the signal client is very straightforward and easy to use. You gonna teach your grandma how to connect to a mumble or matrix server?
I know you are a nerd but your users are not.
My grandma does not use any kind of phone, so it is going to be hard to get her to Element or Signal or anything.
However, my mother does use Element to talk with me and it wasn't that hard to help her download an app, tell her where to put the username and what is the name of the matrix server and quickly she was on her way to start a call and setup a room with the rest of the family where I share the pictures of her grandkids.
My users may not be nerds, but they are not stupid. They can learn.
Moxie is not friendly towards such third party clients that connect to the main network. Also, I only used it as an example. There might be other reasons for a ban. The point is that you don't depend on them.
And for the love of God, people should stop calling Signal secure as long as it is tied to a phone number. You cannot get a SIM card in my country without not having it tied to your ID card number, address, and so forth. You are not anonymous on Signal.
They can tell that you got a phone number and use signal. Apart from when you first and last used signal (timestamp), as in sent messages, that's about all the info signal has on you, and can provide. That sounds pretty good. Even if it is tied to a physical identity. The fact that your content is sufficiently encrypted and cannot be tied to your identity, even by signal, means what you say is anonymized.
> people should stop calling Signal secure as long as it is tied to a phone number.
Like nearly everything, "secure" is a spectrum and not binary. On that spectrum, Signal is overwhelmingly more secure than most messenger apps people actually use.
You are right, although as long as it is tied to me, it is not secure according to my definition, but sure, it is more secure than most instant messaging apps. I do not think it is a good thing to have my phone number, or even my e-mail tied to it when you can easily do it in another way. With e-mails the problem is that most have a thing against throwaway e-mails, and non-throwaway ones are difficult to sign up for using a VPN, let alone Tor, for example. It is still pretty much tied to you. There are so many ways to do it without using either of those. I suppose they may use those things as an anti-spam mechanism or something, but see below for an instant messaging app that does not require these and where DDoS attacks or spamming is not much of a concern. For the record, in Ricochet you got random IDs in the form of "ricochet:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". You share your Ricochet ID to be able to get a connection request.
To me, Ricochet is the most secure instant messaging app for desktop. It would be even better were it to use Onion v3, and if it were available on Android, but then again, I do not really consider my phone secure by default with all the Google crapware. I disabled the default Google keyboard and downloaded one that does not require Internet connection and that is not related to Google in any way. It is so silly that I cannot even delete any apps that came with my phone. So they say its storage capacity is 32 GB. Half of that is spent on crap that came with the phone, splendid. In any case, I am going off-topic here so... :)
haven't followed matrix implementation for a while. Last time I checked their e2ee was still not quite ready to deserve that name[1]. is it a solved problem now and is crypto used in matrix now truly e2ee so that it can be comparaed to Signal. Maybe I've missed the research papers suggesting otherwise but it seems comparing Signal w. Matrix is apples and oranges (even when just talking about e2ee and ignoring the centralized/federated aspects of the 2 technologies)
what is the actual state of matrix e2ee today? (or is that question silly because it depends what the individual matrix clients chooses to implement).
I'm extremely excited about having a federated e2ee messenger, however as a "Lawful-Intercept" realist, I don't have a lot of hope that it will not get forced to comply with current EU regulation proposals, that prevents Matrix from fulfilling its promise as fully e2ee. (e.g. the future that we're heading to in the EU is the same as 5/9-eye countries: there will be a "legal" way of encryption and another one that is illegal, all depending if access can be given to 3rd parties / LE...)
[1] (Sad) state of E2EE in Matrix clients (from 2018): https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avyen/sad_state_o...
So that article talks about third party clients - third party e2ee support has gone from "basically none" to "a few clients". It's complaints for the official client is that e2ee is opt in (not anymore), fingerprints are shown base64 rather than base10 (a: who cares, b: there's an emoji encoded display now for shorter user recognisible fingerprints) and that it warns about being in beta (it isn't anymore).
> e.g. the future that we're heading to in the EU is the same as 5/9-eye countries: there will be a "legal" way of encryption and another one that is illegal, all depending if access can be given to 3rd parties / LE...
Why do you say there will be, as if the future is predetermined? Perhaps we should re-evaluate that and help prevent it from happening instead of complacently stating something as if it is a foregone conclusion?
Your words matter here. The way you are using them is helping materialize the future you do not want.
Signal can at least in principle censor user content, because they control both server and clients. (And they do, for example you can "delete" your messages that are stored on other clients.)
With Matrix you have the choice to use whatever server or client you like, which makes it difficult to censor.
So in this regards, Matrix is no different from email. Should it be expected that the play store will ban email clients?
> Signal can at least in principle censor user content, because they control both server and clients.
But given E2E and the Sealed Sender[0] functionality, they could only suppress messages based on the recipient's user ID, not based upon message content or the sender's ID. This all or nothing approach is a rather ineffective method of censoring – it basically just amounts to banning a user account. I wouldn't even call it censoring in the first place as that term, at least to me, refers to a more selective and refined approach.
> (And they do, for example you can "delete" your messages that are stored on other clients.)
This has nothing to do with censoring and nothing to do with Signal controlling "both server and clients". The Signal developers simply extended the protocol to include "delete" requests for previously sent messages. The client app still needs to implement the actual deletion, though. You could easily compile the Signal app yourself with that functionality removed and then nothing would get deleted from your message history anymore.
I mean, sure, 99% of users are not going to do this. But this is no different in the case of Matrix, where most people just download the default apps like Element from the app store.
So I don't even understand what your statement
> they control […] clients
is supposed to mean. Yes, they write the source code. So? Someone has to produce and maintain the source code and whoever does it will obviously be in a position of power. Producers are always going to decide what they produce. Consumers don't get a say in this – unless they become producers themselves (and in case of open-source software) adapt the product to their needs. Again, this is nothing new and is the case with Matrix, too.
This would be a point weighting that Signal's servers or the network connection to the servers is compromised, in a Bayesian filter.
To put it in terms of your logic: it that were case, it means Signal is not secure.
I was attempting to imitate one of these "clickbait headlines".
It seems this always requires the /sarcasm tag. =)
Which one?
Can we get Elon to tweet?
My comment elsewhere got buried but it might be useful to you.
Pattle also appears to have been removed. Ditto and FluffyChat at the moment appear to still be up on the store though. For those unaware, these are all Matrix clients.
Afaik Pattle is discontinued
Dunno, it's still listed as an official app and links to the play store.
It's discontinued, the links are stale.
Update posted on Twitter:
> Morning all. We've had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we're working with them to explain how Element works and get the situation resolved.
Maybe someone can let Google know that Element is not a publisher.
No but Matrix.org will likely be considered one. I mean the Twitter app isn’t a publisher but Twitter sure it.
If Matrix only facilitated private communications then they could probably tell Google to piss off but they became a social network when they included public chatrooms.
So when's twitter getting its take down?
I think it’s funny that they think Google cares at all about the implementation details of your service. The only thing that matters to app reviewers is what the user sees when they use it. If you make your app technically unmoderatable, impossible to remove illegal content, or impossible to respond to DMCA requests you don’t get to just throw your hands up.
> The only thing that matters to app reviewers is what the user sees when they use it.
If that were true, web browsers would be in trouble.
I understand Google Chrome can be used to view objectionable illegal content.
It’s not that the app can be used to view the content. It’s that Matrix apps are basically matrix.org clients with an option to use another home server if you want. If you followed the default onboarding you get a Matrix.org account. It’s the default blessed server from the project. So Element will now forever get blowback from public content hosted on Matrix.org.
Element is a Matrix.org client that lets users choose another server if they want. And Matrix.org hosts public chatrooms. So the fate of Element is tied to content hosted by Matrix.org.
Older protocols such as HTTP are grandfathered in; if the web was invented last week, browsers probably would be blocked periodically.
That really sucks. Here's to hoping they don't end up using this to pressure you into compromising your feature set somehow.
Incidentally I was always kinda surprised that the upgrade nag links in Riot Android redirected to Play store instead of f-droid
Good luck! I hope you get this resolved soon.
In the meantime, what is the explanation for the F-Droid version lagging behind?
F-Droid publish their own builds; part of their mission is to independently build and package the upstream from source to avoid risk of the upstream doing anything unpleasant.
Got it, thanks for the info. I donated 100 dollars via https://f-droid.org/en/donate/ in the hope it helps them. Thank you and everyone working on Element and Matrix as well!
Can they not automate that? That would probably put them _ahead_ of the Play Store
It's not their goal. They want to be able to check the source code and verify it does what the developers claim it does.
The Matrix developers could, however, set up their own F-Droid repository and publish their own (automated) builds there.
Lack of resources, plain and simple. The f-droid folks are operating on a shoestring budget last time I checked, which is shocking for a project of such significance.
How do we get Google Chrome pulled for abusive content?
You, like Parler, have been targeted by the powers that be. You may have nothing else in common other than that but, you're in the same boat it seems.
Parler curated the content on their platform for months including shadowbanning new accounts until they had been approved by volunteer moderators. Accounts on Parler called for and planned violence against elected officials for months. Executives at the company spoke often and publicly supporting that content.
If your going to argue with a straight face the this new situation is the same as Parler, your putting Element side by side with some very bad company.
> If your going to argue with a straight face the this new situation is the same as Parler
Just go reread what gp wrote. He basically said the exact opposite of this. You are putting words in his mouth and interpereting his comment in the least charitable way possible.
Op said they there is nothing else in common.
They are in the same boat as parler in the sense that another communication platform not owned by a big corp is being targeted and removed.
Matrix likely will come back for some of the reasons you mention . But fact is google and apple arbitrarily without warning or notice remove apps from their store. The stores should be considered utility like electricity google should not able to refuse service randomly.
> parler in the sense that another communication platform not owned by a big corp
Parler is owned by the Mercer family, of Renaissance Technologies fame, one of the most successful hedge funds in existence. They are personally worth tens of billions of dollars.
Still not even close to the trillon+ worth of google or apple.
Also just cause they worth billions means they will back parler with billions. Parler itself is pretty small fish financially speaking
Do you have any sources supporting your statements here? This feels like fake news to me.
A large portion of these protests were planned on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/faceboo...
...should they be removed and silenced because of it? Or should all of these gigantic tech companies with the checkbooks to provide exhaustive moderation enjoy their 230 powers while denying the right to all of the little guys?
Parlor and Gab are fairly harrowing examples of what happens when censorship occurs. People leave platforms with diverse views and head to echo chambers. Those folks end up having stronger, more radical opinions because they were forced into a corner.
No one has ever given me any compelling reason for censorship. Hate is defeated in the open, it is fairly impossible to deal with in private channels. Censors also cannot censor everything, so content always slips through the cracks.
> Accounts on Parler called for and planned violence against elected officials for months. Executives at the company spoke often and publicly supporting that content.
Did not know this, you have a source for this?
No, Parler executives did not “speak often publicly supporting planned violence against elected officials”. They would have been arrested already if this was that clear of a trail.
It turns out it was Facebook that was used for planning.
People will surely point out the obvious differences between the takedown of Parler and Element and I'd agree that it's not exactly the same thing, since Parler is its own platform and Element is just a client.
However, when looking on a bigger picture of the recent takedowns and trying to make sense of it, it does indeed seem to be connected. The only conclusion that seems rational to me is as follows:
Everyone tries to push their burden of moderation on people below them, because no one can actually keep up with it. And if the moderation is not enforced, they risk being taken down by someone above them. That would explain why everyone is so trigger happy when it comes to censorship. When the WallStreetBets people were taken down by Facebook and Discord, they didn't ban the individuals who were actually violating the policy, but the entire community.
It's also worth to note, that the takedowns can be enforced selectively, as we see here - Google obviously won't take down their own browser or email client, that also allows to access abusive content - assuming that's what Element was taken down for. It's probably selectively enforced on the social media too, but I'm out of the loop on what actually goes on there, so to be fair, I cannot prove it.
If this is actually what is happening, the only solution as far as I see it, is to extend the First Amendment to social media. Another solution could be to convince the people and the media to stop pressuring companies into deplatforming other people, but that's in my opinion definitely not going to happen. So it's either applying the protections of 1A to the internet or the censorship will get worse and worse.
> Parler is its own platform and Element is just a client.
Indeed, people made that point, but I don't see how this is a useful distinction. Parler (the app) that Google and Apple removed is also just a client, that facilitates access to Parler (the social media website) that can be accessed via other means, e.g. a web browser. And Google and Apple didn't really have any problems with the app itself, which has no content on its own; they wanted different moderation policies on the website. As they have no direct control over the website, they acted against the client app; it was Amazon that took down the website.
One difference might be that Elements and Matrix have different developers and Parler (the app) and Parler (the social media website) have the same owner. But again, this is not a meaningful difference; e.g. if Google and Apple had problem with content on Reddit (the website), surely they would remove both Reddit (the app) and all 3rd party clients, Apollo, Boost, Sync, etc, at least those that fail to actively censor the objectionable parts of the website in the app.
So Apple/Google saw Parler (the website) as having dangerous content and took it out on Parler (the app). If they are justified in that; it is not a big stretch that they saw Matrix (protocol) as having dangerous content and took it out on Element (app), and presumably other clients. I don't think whether it is decentralized or not matters from an app store policy point of view.
Two companies having the say on which programs almost everyone can run on their mobile devices, especially on the iOS side, is a huge problem, that becomes increasingly evident as they start to flex their muscles.
> If this is actually what is happening,
That’s a big “if” though. The “abusive content” angle is just a working theory. It could just as easily be Goodge taking a dislike to a website link offering donations outside of the Play store (or something equally mundane).
The problem is, until Google respond, we have no idea why the takedown happened.
And here lies the real problem: without Google being transparent about their takedowns it leaves app developers in a difficult position where they can’t really support their uses.
The one slight good thing from all this is that at least with Android you can side load apps (which is more than can be said for iOS).
Sure. But as we learned, the only way to get them to respond at all is to do what we're doing right now. Blow the story up all over the internet, accuse them of censorship, call for regulations and hopefully get the media to pick it up.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying that the accusations of censorship and calls for regulations are dishonest on our part. I really do believe that what they are doing is censorship and they need to be regulated.
Yep, abusive content.
> Morning all. We've had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we're working with them to explain how Element works and get the situation resolved.
>Everyone tries to push their burden of moderation on people below them, because no one can actually keep up with it. And if the moderation is not enforced, they risk being taken down by someone above them. That would explain why everyone is so trigger happy when it comes to censorship. When the WallStreetBets people were taken down by Facebook and Discord, they didn't ban the individuals who were actually violating the policy, but the entire community.
There's a much simpler explanation: Google wants as much of your communication as possible to go through them or their partners, so they can monetise it. People using Parler or Matrix don't leak any information to Big Tech, so commercially it makes sense to deter people from using apps like that, and they'll use whatever excuse they can get away with.
But as of right now Telegram and Signal is still up, isn't it? Though they're already being slandered in the media, so you might have a point here.
To support my explanation, see for example this:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/25/21532883/paypal-cuts-tie...
PayPal terminated Epik's account, because they refused to kick out Gab. I believe there were a couple more cases where the money people pressured companies to do things like that. My memory is getting blurry with this though, so I can't point you to the articles.
And that leads me to something even more important. Gab was not only kicked out off their domain registrar, but the owner's family was blacklisted by Visa. So the social media is actually the least of my concerns right now, the most urgent thing at the moment is regulating the banks, so they can't terminate your account for no reason. Because they will come after your money at some point. And good luck paying in cash in a middle of pandemic.
In theory the recent Office of Comptroller of the Currency rule banning financial discrimination should stop that. But I am sure the current administration will be quick to reverse it. They like to use all tools to go after their political enemies
>If this is actually what is happening, the only solution as far as I see it, is to extend the First Amendment to social media.
The first amendment works now by having clear boundaries between private and public spaces. Public spaces have clear first amendment protections. I can hold a sign on a publicly owned sidewalk (well, public right of way) begging for money or praising 'bong hits for Jesus'. But private spaces do not. I can't do the same thing on your living room. This allows folks to exercise their freedom of association, which is a pretty big part of the first amendment.
Where and how do you draw the line between public and private spaces then in an online context? Should the government be required to host unmoderated and uncensored discussion boards? And how do you keep the unregulated public spaces useful when such spaces are easily overrun by trolls and spammers?
There is already somewhat of a precedent set for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
As to how you would implement it, Poland recently had a proposal that if you were banned from a social media website, you can appeal via the government in a certain period of time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25736155
I'm not a lawyer, so I might be saying a bunch of nonsense here, but you could categorize the social media into topical (eg. HN is about technology) or "general purpose", off-topic services (Facebook, Youtube). Or just do it by the size of user base. Facebook has like a 2 or 3 billion users, let's not pretend it's the same as a comment section on your blog.
It's just to throw some ideas around, because again, not a lawyer, so I can't come up with a robust policy on the spot and take care of every potential loophole.
>the only solution as far as I see it, is to extend the First Amendment to social media
I would love this, personally.
For the past few years, it seems that Trump was really the only thing standing in the way of Big Tech; but now that they've crushed him and the fringe extremists, the extremes have shifted and they are only going to wield their powers even more. The events of the past few months are certainly showing a pattern, and quite frankly, it's extremely scary to see what I thought would happen, actually happen. They have killed the canaries, and the frog is starting to boil.
I don't agree with OP here but I've found a lot of people from the Parler/Gab crowd have found Matrix lack of content moderation appealing and have been in channels on the Matrix directory that have all the same content as Parler/Gab. I would recommend the Matrix team start taking content moderation more seriously as my experience is they do not take it seriously. They may want to disable room creation on matrix.org in the meantime.
Can you give me an example of the things you have seen on matrix that should be moderated? Should matrix devs limit the amount of people that can use their open federated network so they can afford to moderate every e2ee group chat around the globe?
So to clarify, these are rooms that are on matrix.org. I'm not following your statement on limiting opening federated network. I am suggesting that matrix.org stop users with the name "kikedestroyer" on their own instance from connecting to matrix.org rooms and talking about exterminating jews. What KD does on their own instance of matrix is not of my or matrix.org concern.
Element and Parler are nothing alike.
Element is a chat client. It's an empty piece of software for use with your own choice of server. Element is to a chat server, as Thunderbird is to an email server. It's basically a glorified IRC client. It contains no content of its own.
Parler was basically a curated, centrally run, Facebook-message-board-replacement for neonazis, antisemites, qanon conspiracy theorists, and the lunatic fringe of the alt-right.
Technical distinctions are irrelevant to someone at headquarters worried about having a regulatory probe inserted in their backside.
But this one is important, no? This is like banning Firefox because it can connect to illegal content.
Yea, it's a lot like that. The idea of banning browsers that don't actively police what users are able to access (maybe via something like a global blacklist) is no longer crazy.
It is relevant, it makes it more absurd than Parler's bans but, I was just trying to point out they're for the same core reason.
As I said nothing else in common....
What is your policy surrounding your push notifications for your apps in the stores, when those notifications are originating from end servers on which people are saying things that you don't like?
That's good. I switched away from IRC to Discord back around 2016 because it was tedious to use with mobile networks. Discord has served the community I moderate pretty well, but I am always concerned that the company will go under some day. I've been eyeing Matrix for a while as an alternative and it'd be a blow to have one of its largest clients removed. Here's hoping it gets back soon.
I wonder if this is some sort of an organised thing. I think there are services that sell a take down service so that they upload questionable content on the competitors apps or websites and then report it.
There are a LOT of channels unmoderated in the matrix directory that could have been reported, so this isn't surprising. I have abuse complaints emailed to your abuse address that have gone unanswered, so I don't believe that you're taking your terms of use seriously.
You can find my complaints in your inbox. It's good to know Google is taking action - will send the same complaints to them in the future since that seems to get more of a response from the devs.
Yeah, we better make sure every corner of the internet is moderated. /s
These are rooms that are on matrix.org directory list. So yes, they should be moderating this content.
If you don't have anything to contribute other than a sarcastic comment that misses the point of my statement then consider not contributing at all.
please keep F-Droid repo up to date. please don't create your own repo.
sorry this is happening to you guys. i hope this situation gets sorted out.
not saying i agree with the decision here, but hn is sometimes so quick to blame google.
what surprised me though, is that you guys are aware of abusive content on the network and even put a "moderation" guide in place. so much good faith in people here...
So are you going to remove email clients from the play store if someone sends offensive emails?
> Element is a Matrix client just as Chrome is a Web browser, and just as it’s possible to view abusive material via Chrome, the same is true of Element.
> However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (...) we have a fairly strict terms of use (...) which we proactively enforce.
These two sentences are contradictory. Either you are a road or a road restaurant. You can't have it both ways.
The first sentence is about Element.
The second sentence is about matrix.org
It seems to me that it is the other way round, isn't it? Although having matrix.org be an Element client is extremely confusing. If "matrix.org" is moderated it would seem that the whole protocol is moderated (and thus, not a neutral carrier).
In web terms: - Element is like a browser - matrix.org is like a bulletin board
In e-mail terms: - Element is like a mail client - matrix.org is like a given community of mailing lists
In IRC terms: - Element is like an IRC client - matrix.org is like an IRC server/network e.g. Freenode.
Matrix.org is just one server deployment that implements the matrix protocol. You can deploy your own server or even your own implementation, and moderate it how you want. It has nothing to do with element. The apology is apt, as just like a browser speaks http, element speaks matrix.
Element is just one of many Matrix user agents and matrix.org offers just one of many Matrix servers.
Each server has the freedom to enforce its own policy. Given that the matrix.org server is a kind of a public face for the protocol, it makes sense that its policies are more mainstream.
There is nothing in the protocol itself (nor in the official Element clients) enforcing any kind of content policy.
Is this google starting to test the waters when it comes to arbitrarily kicking out software they personally don't like? (open source, decentralized, privacy oriented etc.) I might of course be exaggerating a bit here, keep that in mind.
- Element and Matrix are growing but still not equipped to fight back at large against this, so it is unlikely to create too much negative press
- If Google starts to catch too much critique for this decision they can put it back and always blame $error
I believe Element will be back soon, the problem I see here is that it will be framed as an "honest mistake" and then become forgotten until they pull another stunt like this.
Even if these removals are temporary, they can still hurt growth. Let's assume a bit more malice: Couldn't Google just monitor and analyze metrics of an undesirable app (downloads, usage, hype), pick a critical point in its growth then "accidentaly" remove it for a few days, causing damage that isn't immediately apparent, but nonetheless long lasting?
>Is this google starting to test the waters when it comes to arbitrarily kicking out software they personally don't like? (open source, decentralized, privacy oriented etc.)
Absolutely. They've done similar things with similar apps. You just have to pay some attention to see the pattern.
Let's take video for example. They Kicked LBRY client off Play store not so long ago. (It eventually got reinstated.) They permanently banned BitChute app. Not app-related, but currently Rumble is suing Google for manipulating video search results in favor of YouTube. Look up the details, they are quite interesting.
Meanwhile, Google has an agreement with all Android hardware providers that forces them to pre-install YouTube and make it non-removable.
And then you occasionally see more subtle stuff like this:
"Since Android 8.0 Oreo, Google doesn't allow apps to run in the background anymore, requiring all apps which were previously keeping background connection to exclusively use its Firebase push messaging service."
https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/mas...
how is this handled for SIP softphones that can run persistently in the background, in a direct SIP or SIP-over-TLS connection to a server? for instance:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.linphone&h...
that's just a random example I thought of since I use it, but I can also think of a lot of other Android apps that I'm fairly sure aren't using any client-server communications mediated through google firebase, yet they continue to function while backgrounded on android 10 and 11.
I'm not sure how Linphone is doing it but all the apps I used that required to run in the background were required to show a notification at all time.
This is a terrible UX, my notification center is useless because I always have those apps in there (KDEConnect and Syncthing for example)
Just FYI, you can set those notifications to be ‘silent’ (not displayed on the top) and to collapse into a thin line each—in the system's notification settings. The apps still keep running, however I haven't figured out whether this change affects the frequency with which the background service is called by the system, and thus synchronization delays.
Don't forget that turning off the screen can wildly affect service behavior even for foreground services, and these effects vary across vendors:
https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-sta...
Linphone does show a persistent notification while running and registered to a server.
VoIP has always been treated a bit differently to regular apps on both platforms. I vaguely remember about 10 years ago both iOS and Android had special permissions specifically for VoIP apps to run in the background.
On iOS that's pretty much all been removed. The access gateway has to send an APNS notifications when there is an inbound call.
Android has it's own SIP stack. It's even exposed in the standard Android phone dialler from Google. In the settings for that app look under "calling accounts".
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/sip
I haven't looked, but I'm sure just like Firebase, services get a special exemption to receive SIP notifications.
The Android SIP stack is pretty crummy. Last I tried to use it there was no support for TLS registration (leaving your calls unencrypted, barebacking the web) or for push notifications.
Linphone, Zoiper, etc can show a badge in your notifications menu/top bar at all times and get semi-reliable access to run in the background, but expect to miss 5% to 20% of all incoming calls. Firebase push notifications are mandatory if you care about battery life or reliable inbound calling :c
> leaving your calls unencrypted, barebacking the web
btw. most of the time only the session is unencrypted, not the media. when sip uses sips it will encrypt both the session and the media. but the latter is pretty uncommon and most often you wil see unencrypted session and an encrypted rtp stream. this is still the default, even deutsche telekom does it like that by default, even in their commerical offerings like "cloud pbx", because you would need to pay extra for the encrypted session.
and btw. sip over tls mostly means that the call is encrypted, but the sip messages aren't.
Firebase push messages are best effort an by no means guaranteed. You will still miss calls/notifications, even high priority ones.
I'm still looking for a guaranteed push service/library.
> It's even exposed in the standard Android phone dialler from Google.
If I recall correctly Samsung modifies the standard android dialler to disable this functionality. Or at last they did in the S5 that I used.
I think the situation is probably more interesting than deliberate anticompetitive evil. I bet that there was indeed some policy violation, and some minor bureaucrat is reasonably applying the policy, but in a way that misses the big-picture impact of doing so, for example threads of outrage high on Hacker News. The policies back them into being a monopolistic heavy whether they mean to or not, because they're so big that they basically have to rule the world and there's no mechanism for outsiders to have a say.
The real problem is that the policies are not adapting to rapidly changing conditions (i.e. yet another takedown, howls of outrage, calls for regulation), and the big tech companies have become too sclerotic to cope with that. Worse (for them), they're vulnerable to being gamed. Once people figure out that saying "Jehovah" triggers the policy, some will keep saying "Jehovah Jehovah Jehovah" just to fuck with them and grow the popular outrage.
> The policies back them into being a monopolistic heavy whether they mean to or not
That only happens because they deliberately put themselves in a position of market power. If they didn't have such crazy amounts of power nobody would care about their "policies" misfiring. None of this is accidental in the big picture, we're well past any window of plausible deniability with Google. They can't perpetually claim incompetence.
I'm not sure what the complaint is there. They grew their business, which is what every business tries to do, nothing unique to Google about that. The interesting question is are they finally becoming a victim of their success. It seems obvious to me that the big tech companies have grown past the size where public interest / public square questions start to kick in, which is why the "it's a private company, they can do what they want on their own platform, no free speech issues to see here" argument is so weak. It's also not at all in the long-term political interests of the people who've recently adopted it as a mantra, just for a temporary advantage over their adversaries. Not smart, guys.
The complaint is, we don't need to allow big tech so much power. Utilities are heavily regulated to prevent monopolistic abuse. Big tech is showing similar "natural monopoly" tendencies and so needs to be reigned in with regulation because free markets are failing here.
Very well put. Sympathetic. Yet still culpable even if they can't scale Google scale right?
They kicked out Paytm in India because they were offering "lottery" prizes in the same way that their Google-competitor Gpay was.
I don't think this is the case. But in my opinion, the fact that we have no way of knowing and have to rely on Google not to do that is the real issue.
> Even if these removals are temporary, they can still hurt growth.
I don't think so. A lot of people were not aware of Matrix even, it's geek tech.
Now, just watch how this Streisand effect unfolds over the weekend.
This is a critical growth period for smaller platforms.
Seems like the first step to kicking out competing web browsers, if the browsers don't moderate what you browse.
"Don't Be Evil" - Looks like the roots of Google are far behind them now.
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
Unless 30% of your traffic is AMP, your browser gets a demerit.
And email clients.
Would there be a way to demonstrate that this hurt your growth and could you seek damages for this, despite the terms of service?
And if this is actually a pattern with the Google Play Store, couldn’t someone design an elaborate set of traps to demonstrate this in Court?
Say you demonstrate it in a fullproof way, what are you seeking damages for? A store kicking your product out according to the agreement?
I.e. the thing you need to show in court isnt that Google stopped selling your app in its store because it didn't like it rather that it's a monopolistic marketplace or the terms are somehow invalid or so on. These are much higher bars, especially with 3rd party stores and side loading being available and used on the platform. It's considered a battle to prove these things in the Apple ecosystem I can't imagine trying to prove them in Play first.
>Is this google starting to test the waters
Yes, I'm convinced the YouTube algos did this to my channel during summer 2020. Their algos wait in silence until triggered.
Big tech platform who participate in anti-competitive practices (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) know the optimal time to pull the plug to flatten the curve and prevent competition from going exponential.
I believe that removal of Element from Google Play Store is a violation of EU regulation 2019/1150. Element has legal entities in Britain (which is affected by Brexit but has similar law) and France. Google is LEGALLY required to provide a justification for removal 30 days before application removal.
Anyway, you may try contacting Google using EU regulation 2019/1150 violation procedure, see https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/9969397 for more information. This may be more effective than using a regular contact procedure, as it would show Google that you are aware of this regulation and they are unlikely to win.
Note that I'm not a lawyer.
> Google is LEGALLY required to provide a justification for removal 30 days before application removal.
You mean this?
2. Where a provider of online intermediation services decides to terminate the provision of the whole of its online intermediation services to a given business user, it shall provide the business user concerned, at least 30 days prior to the termination taking effect, with a statement of reasons for that decision on a durable medium.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Firstly, I'm not sure whether they really terminated "the provision of the whole of its online intermediation services" or just suspended the one app store listing.
Secondly, there are exceptions:
4. The notice period in paragraph 2 shall not apply where a provider of online intermediation services:
(a) is subject to a legal or regulatory obligation which requires it to terminate the provision of the whole of its online intermediation services to a given business user in a manner which does not allow it to respect that notice period; or
(b) exercises a right of termination under an imperative reason pursuant to national law which is in compliance with Union law;
(c) can demonstrate that the business user concerned has repeatedly infringed the applicable terms and conditions, resulting in the termination of the provision of the whole of the online intermediation services in question.
In cases where the notice period in paragraph 2 does not apply, the provider of online intermediation services shall provide the business user concerned, without undue delay, with a statement of reasons for that decision on a durable medium.
So it all comes down to what their reasons for the suspension were.
EDIT: Just saw this update: https://mobile.twitter.com/element_hq/status/135546565011484... So they revealed their reasons within 12 hours, which I'm going to file under "without undue delay". (But did they use a "durable medium"?)
Hm, yeah, I think you are right here.
That said, the reason for removal provided by Google seems to be nonsensical ("abusive content somewhere on Matrix", really?), so mediation should be effective here. This particular reason easily applies to an application like Google Chrome, and EU regulation 2019/1150 requires differential treatment to be documented, which I don't think it is in this case.
Chrome has “malicious website” feature to censor any website they want. Does Element have anything similar?
Yes, any Element user can report abusive or offensive content to admin of the Matrix server they connect to, and admin can remove the content locally and/or block remote Matrix servers from which the content originates. At their discretion.
That's optional. User can turn it off.
But it's on by default, just like Reddit apps are required to have NSFW filters on by default.
I dunno if it's possible to do this kind of filter on Matrix.
That said, if they go with this argument, the precedent would have to apply to all other unfiltered, federated messaging clients, including those for IRC and email.
If there's a backlash, it will just be explained as an "oops," like when Firefox devs catch them doing stuff like this:
>https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-executive-claims-that-go...
>In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozila Firefox. He went on to say that:
>>YouTube serves a Shadow DOM polyfill to Firefox and Edge that is, unsurprisingly, slower than Chrome's native implementation. On my laptop, initial page load takes 5 seconds with the polyfill vs 1 without. Subsequent page navigation perf is comparable.
I worked around this problem in Firefox by changing the browser useragent for the YouTube site to an older version # though the fix won't last forever.
I have become accustomed to using multiple browsers and OSes simply because of all the issues surrounding video playback.
I worked around this by removing YouTube from my life. I've been making much more progress on my personal projects since.
I simply accepted it loads slower. It's long bad if I don't have 5s to wait.
If I need youtube, I go to an invidious instance first.
I have no idea whether this is correlated with the other recent de-platforming events, but the rapidly growing list of examples is now getting ridiculous. It’s crazy to imagine that the rug could get pulled out from beneath any of us, any time, under any pretext (or no pretext at all!). I don’t know whether a more apt metaphor alludes to serfs on feudal land, or The Trial by Kafka.
If it turns out this is because of specific discussions/channels then banning the Element app for that makes about as much sense as banning Facebook/Twitter for what some people said, or Google because of what some website says.
This is the upside down crazy we are faced with when a tiny number of giant companies make decisions on whims of ever changing policy.
We need to fight back with things like PWAs to bypass the app stores, web socket chats, distributed social platforms, and plain old web pages to publicly document these attacks on free speech. Call/email Congress too. Get friends and neighbors to do the same. They are already alerted to this growing abuse by these monopolistic giants.
Good point. https://hydrogen.element.io works very well as a PWA, but doesn’t have push support yet.
HSTS preloading blacklists may at some future point, block PWA as well.
The real problem is indeed how much power society has given these corps. It's time to take back some power or we will never be able to.
Even easier, the website used by the PWA can end up on the blacklist of Google Safe Browsing [1]
In the medium/long term, this would just train people to ignore those popups. Or to use a patched browser.
There is simply no way to suppress content as long as there's enough demand. Somebody's always going to find a way to deliver. That's even true for really illegal stuff like drugs, copyright infringement or child abuse material, but so much more for content which is legal.
I was thinking specifically about PWA on Android. I don't think you can change the browser used in that case, and I could see Google decide that you cannot open a PWA if the website is on the blacklist.
Apple has a hard requirement that you use the safari rendering engine for all browsers. So even Firefox on iOS is really just reskined safari.
Android is much more open, you can download Firefox on Android and it will infact be Firefox.
What would be more scary is if the force all browsers on the Google store to implement and enforce the same deny list.
> HSTS preloading blacklists may at some future point, block PWA as well.
What on earth are you talking about?
1) As far as I am aware, there is no "HSTS preloading blacklist". I'm not sure what that would even mean.
2) HSTS preloading is not a prerequisite for creating a PWA. Nor is presence on the HSTS preload list (not "blacklist") an obstacle to creating a PWA.
Banning Element because of channels created on a decentralised network makes as much sense as banning a web-browser because of websites created on a decentralised network (i.e., the Internet). Looking forward to Chrome's imminent removal from the Play Store.
only if chrome is not censoring internet which google is happy to do
OEMs and software vendors have been pushing hard towards locking-down and controlling people's computing devices and people have largely been indifferent.
It genuinely seemed all was going to be lost until the tech industry went crazy exercising their control. Their recent (and imo unjustifiable) actions have clearly demonstrated to everyone what it means to hand over control. It remains to be seen whether people will grasp this chance to reverse the course that this rotten industry has charted and is adamant on following.
Stallman was right all along. The Google and Apple play to lock down your devices in order to "keep you safe" was not about malware or data privacy, it's about keeping away what THEY classify as thoughtcrime. It's about keeping you under their shoe. Now feed them your data or else!
People on here think that most "normal" people are going to figure out how to sideload apps.
No.
I visited my parents church at the beginning of this year and very few people were talking about that. What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogether which is probably not a bad idea.
> What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogether
That's incredibly encouraging to hear. It seems to be a common feature of "I quit Facebook/Twitter/whatever" accounts that once you break the immediate addiction there's no real urge to go back, so if this does happen it should have a decent chance of sticking.
(And as a mobile refusenik I sometimes feel like the last holdout left, so a bit of company would be nice.)
Assuming from the subtext that GP means they're wanting to give up because of (app)(?) censorship. Having a whole strata of society no longer participating in the conversation is not healthy. Politicians are now looking to these platforms to guide policy decisions, so anybody not on them has no voice.
"the conversation" is not held on Facebook nor on Twitter.
_A_ conversation is held there, which presumes to be _the_ conversation.
Surely politicians aren't using social media as the main driver for policy? The demographic who votes the most (the elderly) is also the demographic that has the smallest presence on social media, so only listening to Twitter seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
It doesn’t even matter if politicians aren’t making decisions based on social media—-their constituents are demanding action because of what they see on it. A video of one person in power choking another person to death got widely shared on Twitter and the result was massive and worldwide protests. Hell, in general social media has replaced pretty much every other form of it, we can’t keep pretending the internet is a niche place anymore.
Anybody not on them still gets to vote. If anything, I suspect that making these platforms increasingly unrepresentative will end up hurting pols who pay attention to them, by giving them an increasingly distorted view of public opinion. If you optimize your messaging for Twitter, an actual electorate is going to drop you like third period French.
People will trade off convinience and representativeness. A lot of psychology studies are famously done on students, because it's just so cheap and easy. I think it's very likely they will just say "screw those backwards hillbillies, I bet they are all racist unpersons anyway"
Oh, I'm sure they will. And they'll end up losing elections as a result.
Both sides will. They can't both lose.
Yeah, I totally get the enjoyment of not being "always available". I have had lengthy periods without a phone, and it teaches you that; no, you don't have to be always available, and no the world will not end etc.
The only "social media" I use is Reddit, but it isn't/I don't use it as they person centric networks like boomerbook/twitter.
Reddit is by far the hardest to quit tho. I get constantly dragged into the shitshow, but can't really get off, because there is useful information there, I can't find anywhere else.
In a similar way, I can't quit smartphones for encrypted messaging and navigation (not even Google Maps, but OSMand).
I don't lump Reddit into the same bucket as FB/Twitter. It's perfectly possible to have a sane, even pleasant experience there if you stay out of the default subs and the obvious dumpster fires. And I think stable-but-pseudonymous identity is turning out to have been the right call.
No doubt, I absolutely agree.
However, I was just saying I cannot stay out of those dumpster fires. Sooner or later, I think to myself "Well, I wonder what's up in the world otherwise. Let's check out /r/all for a moment."... And there we go.
It's not like other people are idiots and I am in control over addiction, impulse, outrage and dopamine. I have spend waaaay too much time on reddit. I hate it, for what it is. Yet, I can't manage to not use it for a prolonged time. Too many niche forums I depend on, and I simply can't tolerate linear, unranked forums anymore.
(LOL), you're not alone.
There's literally twos of us!
I am making an effort to also revert back to keeping physical notebooks. I have a mini library of notebooks that stop at 1996. That year I bought a power pc (for Java) and the record of my thoughts are spread over various boxes, legacy media, and buried deep in nested directories. It was a mistake, in retrospect.
My handwriting is far too bad for physical notebooks ever to be an option.
A lot of people already know that you can get apps directly as .apks, but the majority of them have been conditioned by corporate "propaganda" that they'll be almost certainly getting malware that way. The term "sideloading" was invented to ostracise and discourage the practice of acquiring software independently --- which was the norm up until Apple and its walled garden appeared.
But now, perhaps when sufficiently large numbers of people realise that what "malware" means to the big corporations is different from what it means to users, we'll have another mini-revolution back to the independent sharing and community trust model that the industry tried to eliminate because it would subvert their control.
I don't want to get too political here, but after seeing the outcome of the US election, and the events from then until now, I knew that stuff like this was going to happen.
Ok, that's some historical revisionism I've not see before. The term sideloading was invented by an internet storage service company to refer to copying files between remote storage buckets without having to do an upload or download. The term then got adopted by the community for copying MP3 files to a player from your computer.
In the communities I participated in, that was just called copying, and generic MP3/MP4 player owners were often quick to point out that they could just simply plug in and copy files like a USB drive, whereas iPods needed iTunes and "syncing". I've never seen sideloading being used to describe anything other than to suggest "impropriety" or something that's not "officially unapproved", and only in the context of applications --- I haven't ever heard of someone "sideloading" music to a player either. I bet for the vast majority of others, this is also the case.
There are other terms many people use, for sure, but nevertheless, that’s where the term sideloading comes from.
Keep in mind that you're making a somewhat pedantic point about the difference between "invented" and "adopted" and the core of the criticism is still true.
The thing you did with software direct from the developer used to be called "installing" but now the platform companies call it "sideloading" which sounds like something that would cause an airline to lose your luggage.
Maybe in your social surroundings. In some/many other countries - granted, mostly non-English-speaking they just call it (literal translation) "Installing applications from a file" or "Installing APKs".
But nothing about your facts help me hate on Google and Apple more... can’t the GP be right?
Whatever, I just think it's useful when evaluating an opinion to know whether the person is prone to fantasising and making shit up. There's way too much of that going around these days.
This would have happened no matter the outcome of the US election. The trend towards consolidation of corporate power is really inexorable.
Doing this just a week before FOSDEM [1], a very large conference that will run online using Matrix, is scandalous.
It's almost as if Google is not one person but consists of many people with different opinions/interests
It's almost as if these people didn't coordinate at all in spite of operating as part of the same corporation, enjoying protections such as limited liability. Google is not a subreddit.
The irony is high
This is far from ideal, but someone attending FOSDEM is surely able to download an .apk from official site of Element and install it?
People always mention a workaround when this kind of stuff happens, but censorship can be heavily effective just by reducing access.
If a medium sized business is looking at communication platforms, and element is suddenly not available on the play store, maybe they’ll just Google’s offering instead.
While I agree in general, if you are going to fosdem, you are part of a self-selected group that will jump this hurdle without second thought.
Or from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/im.vector.app/
And Google is a sponsor.
Ironically this move finally made me to consider Matrix. I'm thinking about spinning a server on a non FAANG provider like Vultr or Linode and setting IM services bridges from there. Nowadays I use lots of different communicators to talk to different people and most of these apps track me. If I setup a Matrix server somewhere that allows me to use those networks without having their software installed on my devices that will not only be convenient but also improve my privacy. Not to mention the Matrix network and protocol that can be used to do fun stuff.
Is Dendrite ready for use? I don't have a lot of memory available and I heard Synapse is kinda heavy on resources.
Dendrite is okay for personal use (a few users), matrix-native, using the better-tested clients. IIRC some bridges work with it, but it doesn't implement the whole appservice API, which blocks you from using some of the better bridges.
I do not recommend synapse if you don't have a lot of memory. I put an extra 8 GB stick in my server for it, bringing it to 14 GB.
It routinely likes to take more than 4GB to itself, though it has become a lot leaner lately.
Sadly 4GB is all I have.
On the other hand, I was expecting the bridges to me more like Bitlbee which maps personal accounts to IRC rooms. Matrix bridges seem to be more like syncing the content of a room to another.
There are multiple kind of bridges in Matrix: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/types-of-bridging
It sounds like you'd want puppet bridges. Each of your conversations on the remote side has a corresponding room, and what you say in that room is forwarded by the bridge trough your remote account.
You could try out dendrite.matrix.org as a homeserver (btw, dendrite would nicely fit into these 4GB). Most bridges need admin access to the server though, if you want to host them yourself. t2bot.io hosts a few you'd be able to use with your own dendrite, though it hits capacity problems at times.
Finally, you could try to make synapse leaner by not joining big rooms with hundreds of federating servers. There is a max_complexity (something like it) setting for that use case.
> t2bot.io hosts a few you'd be able to use with your own dendrite
I meant with dendrite.matrix.org. I suggest anyone with their own server should self-host their bridges, for performance and privacy/security.
I'm in the process of setting up a Matrix homeserver myself. It seems like there are some missing features.
From their github:
> Is Dendrite stable?
Mostly, although there are still bugs and missing features. If you are a confident power user and you are happy to spend some time debugging things when they go wrong, then please try out Dendrite. If you are a community, organisation or business that demands stability and uptime, then Dendrite is not for you yet - please install Synapse instead.
> Does Dendrite support push notifications?
No, not yet. This is a planned feature.
> Does Dendrite support application services/bridges?
Possibly - Dendrite does have some application service support but it is not well tested. Please let us know by raising a GitHub issue if you try it and run into problems.
I got it running relatively easy. Lots of client functionality from Element do not work and the shared secret request between devices timeouts.
I also find hard to debug because of all the errors related to broken federated servers. One thing that I recommend is to set "disable_federation: true" until you get some acceptable functionality before enabling it again.
Use Synapse.
Don't forget that F-Droid is a thing, and Android still has at least that much freedom - to install your own software.
Who would have thought 30 years ago someone would be saying "People can run any code they want on their computer" as a shocking thing.
F-Droid bans apps for “hate speech” too[1].
Any mastodon app that refused to blacklist Gab got banned from F-Droid or something like that.
It is the perfect example of why I don’t even bother with federated projects. It’s just “wouldn’t it be great if _I_ were in charge?”
If that’s the situation, I’d rather Big Tech be in charge because at least they have some name recognition and hierarchy for decision making. Nobody cares if pizza-witches wrongfully broke terms. With Twitter at least peoples’ ears perk up.
In other words, there’s no rules in the alley. But there are rules in the town square.
App Store is about central authority. F-Droid is about freedom to add whatever repositories you deem useful. It's up to operators of F-Droid-the-repository to decide what they want to host. But it's up to you to add another repository to the list. You say there's no other repository hosting Gab? That is not a problem that can't be dealt with. Unless network operator decide to ban routes, it's just a work (setting up a repository and trust) that needs to be done.
EDIT: This is mentality I find hilarious. It's either I can something for free or I can't get it at all. I think freedom in this case is about having something with little expended work.
This is mostly untrue.
There was no requirement to blacklist gab. Mastodon clients on f-droid are allowed let users use Gab.
What f-droid does not allow is apps preconfigured to connect to Gab, or who's primary purpose is to connect to Gab.
There was even a petition to have fdroid remove an app (fedilab) that had a blacklist to disallow Gab then removed it, claiming that removing Gab from the blacklist was specifically endorsing it, and there were some people who tried to claiming that not apps that were not blacklisting Gab when other apps did meant those apps primary purpose was to connect to Gab, but f-droid weren't having it: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/1736.
However, they did consider an app that was a straight fork tracking another with the only change being the removal of a blacklist to be disallowed.
So.. They don't ban apps that connect to verboten services, but they do ban apps that acknowledge the existence of verboten services, and apps that remove barriers to verboten services.
That's cutting the hair mightily fine.
Could you rephrase the fourth paragraph?
fedilab was allowed despite removing a blacklist. This was because not having a blacklist was not the app's sole distinction from other mastodon apps (it had a majorly different UI), so its purpose was determined to be more than just accessing Gab.
However, some fdroid users asked for its removal. They felt removing the blacklist feature, which had previously only blocked gab, was itself an endorsement of Gab and indicated the app's purpose was to access Gab since the other available mastodon app (Tusky) still had a blacklist.
fdroid did not agree and fedilab is still available.
OpenTusky was not allowed as it was literally Tusky with the server blacklist removed, created in response to Tusky blocking Gab. It also advertised this in the app description, so fdroid judged it to be primarily for accessing gab and removed it.
F-Droid is both a client and a repository. The official F-Droid repository has policies that were clarified in other replies, but it's also important to note that you can add arbitrary repositories and manage software from them with the F-Droid app.
The "build your own if you don't like it" answer is often absurdly impractical, but not here. Someone who feels it's important can put up an alternate repo containing clients preconfigured to connect to Gab and even an alternate build of F-Droid preconfigured to use it in an afternoon.
Installing software outside of play store is technically possible, but if something contains enough hurdles, most people won't do it, which results in no users and a meaningless platform.
There aren't that many hurdles.
1. You download the apk
2. When you try to install it, it tells you it's from an unknown source and the installation was blocked to protect you
3. You tap "settings" and flip a switch to allow installing apps from your browser
4. You go back and tap "install". That's it. It's done. And you won't need to go to the settings the next time, it'll just work.
The main hurdle is that (without rooting) there doesn't seem to be a way for alternative app stores to silently update software.
That's bearable though unpleasant when you have one or two pieces of software that rarely get updated, that's absolutely impossible when you have 10+ pieces of software - you'll sit there for 5 minutes just approving install prompts every week, which isn't something a normal human is going to do.
It doesn't help that FDroid is pretty broken, and constantly pops up notifications about updates that don't work/aren't actionable (i.e. tapping the notification doesn't result in an install prompt followed by a successful installation, instead I get various errors etc.). Also, apparently the FDroid review process is even slower than the Play store review process.
> there doesn't seem to be a way for alternative app stores to silently update software
Yes — because that's something reserved for privileged system apps. You have to root your device to take advantage of that, or make a custom ROM with the alternative store in it. Having that ability as a permission you could grant to any app is an immense security risk. But then there are "device administrator" apps that can literally factory reset the device... I don't know. Maybe package installation should be part of that. Especially now that the legacy permission model was taken care of — if you install an app that doesn't support runtime permissions, you'll get a list of its permissions with toggles next to them when you run it for the first time.
> you'll sit there for 5 minutes just approving install prompts every week
Unpopular opinion: well-made software that serves its user doesn't need to be updated very often. Remember how you bought a program on a CD and used the exact same build for years?
If you root your device, doesn't that mean you will no longer be able receive Android OS software updates from the phone manufacturer?
> Unpopular opinion: well-made software that serves its user doesn't need to be updated very often. Remember how you bought a program on a CD and used the exact same build for years?
Sure, I'm even old enough to remember this but on cassettes and floppy disks! But - software now is much more complex than it used to be - most software has dependencies on other libraries/frameworks, and has to deal with communication and encryption (where it is all to easy to make subtle mistakes). IMO, for security reasons alone, it's no longer realistic to expect software without at least occasional updates.
> software now is much more complex than it used to be
I'd say software now is much more complex than it needs to be. It's made to ease the life of the developer, usually an inexperienced one, at the expense of the user.
> IMO, for security reasons alone, it's no longer realistic to expect software without at least occasional updates.
If people would stop rewriting things that already work fine, we'll run out of vulnerabilities at some point. Or, if you must rewrite them and have a good reason to do so, at least use a memory-safe language. Even C++ is much better than C and raw pointers. Anything is better than C and raw pointers. Yet all major OS kernels and most userspace components are written in C and use raw pointers and vulnerabilities in those are being found all too often.
> If you root your device, doesn't that mean you will no longer be able receive Android OS software updates from the phone manufacturer?
It often means that. :( But it is not that bad for some devices. Geeks from Lineage community regurarly update closed vendor code in the LineageOS. So if you are lucky and Lineage is well-supported on your device, you can still have root nowadays with up-to-date vendor blobs.
For example I rooted my Xperia XZ2 Compact and I am quite happy with it. By using Magisk and Magisk Hide, I am still able to use Google Pay. At the same time, I can use Titanium Backup and f-droid root extension to let f-droid install updates automatically. I hope this device will last me for a long time as I don't see many alternatives - most other phones are too big for me, too old/slow or unsupported.
How very convinient for Google that "security" means competitors can't have feature parity. But then why are you saying there aren't any hurdles?
> Having that ability as a permission you could grant to any app is an immense security risk
A risk to whom? There is no permission that is a "security risk" so long as it's the device owner granting that permission.
The non-root way to silently update is to install a DPC (device policy controller). Has existed for the past 10 years to support enterprise MDM. Only catch is that to install the DPC you have to factory reset your phone to place it into the special state where no accounts have "ever" been signed in to, which is what allows a DPC to be installed. (Removing all accounts from the device may also work)
The nice thing is that once the DPC is installed you can `adb install -r` (reinstall, ie update) it without needing to factory reset. Just don't uninstall it accidentally :D
Is that something I can do to my phone to make updates via F-Droid more seamless?
Sadly no. I actually went full-on "wait a minute...!" a few weeks ago when I discovered this, but practically speaking, nobody's going to do it ("what, factory reset my phone?! hahaha NO"), and so implementing the necessary support would ultimately be a giant burden.
Technically 100% possible, but practically never going to happen.
If someone were willing to write and maintain the necessary plumbing and then poked F-Droid, it would be interesting to see if they cooperated, but they may well be reluctant to.
That's a feature, not a bug. Believe it or not, people don't like app/sw updates. Devs and money people do.
The main hurdle is that (without rooting) there doesn't seem to be a way for alternative app stores to silently update software.
Does this actually matter? On the desktop it's normal for apps to update themselves. Is there some fundamental reason an Android app cannot do this too?
Yes. The application's executable is not writeable to the app. You need to go through the package installer. This requires a system controlled prompt for the user to confirm an installation, and requires a seperate permission to even ask which is not allowed for third party apps published to the play store (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...).
Er, not quite. The permission required to trigger the app install prompt for an APK is REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES, which is available to third-party apps.
even google play store has a hard time silently updating these days.
These are still four more steps then what it takes to directly install from the Play Store. Most people would view any of these four steps as hurdle.
> And you won't need to go to the settings the next time, it'll just work.
You will still have to find the apk when there is an update, download it and confirm install. There are still three steps to update the apk compared to Play Store's one tap (or even zero clicks if automatic updates are on). Only "Allow installing from this source" step is removed when updating the app.
It's possible to build self-update functionality into an app, just like many apps do on desktop. An app can open that installation prompt to update itself.
Not on the latest versions of Android, unless you're only updating interpreted code like Python. You can no longer execute files that weren't packaged with the original APK.
You can download an apk and launch the package installer activity to install it. In latest versions of Android, you'll need to serve the apk through a ContentProvider. I tested this myself, it works, even if the app is updating itself.
But I think you can actually still load arbitrary dex files using a ClassLoader? I thought that the update was only affecting JNI libraries. I remember reading how they wanted for any and all executable code to come from a signed package. Even then, if you're determined enough, you can load arbitrary native code by allocating some rwx memory pages and copying it in there ;)
Yeah I misinterpreted your original comment. I was thinking in terms of the app being in control of itself ie JNI type stuff.
Sounds like there are ways to do it within the Android ecosystem, but in cases where Google is suspending things wouldn't they just turn off all the self-update stuff?
Google doesn't have the technical ability to "turn off all the self-update stuff", if you mean preventing non-store apps from updating themselves by downloading and installing apks. The worst thing they can try doing is bullying the users into uninstalling the app through Google Play Protect.
I'm not deep enough in the Android ecosystem to understand all the details. I've only had the misfortune of trying to get a (very portably-written) golang application to run in the environment, and hitting roadblock after roadblock.
I guess my overall point is that Google is motivated to have complete control over Android app distribution, and they'll plug as many of the types of holes you're talking about as they can get away with.
Sadly, you lost the 90% of users who are not tech experts by point 2.
So be it. It's okay for technology to require education. Stop infantilizing users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Dropbox wouldn't be a thing if we can "educate" users.
Dropbox's selling point is its simplicity. Apple's as well, for that matter. It's perfectly fine to have simplicity as your selling point.
Many people, myself included, love products that "just work" out of the box. That's what everything should be like, ideally. My gripe with modern technology is that it actively inhibits your ability to go in and tinker. DRM, forced app stores, code signing with enforced signing identity, all that kind of stuff.
See, imagine someone releases an amazing messaging app that's lightyears ahead of everything else on the market. But — it's only available through F-Droid or as an apk download on the developer's website. People will flock there and install it. And they will be unstoppable.
A concrete example of this phenomenon: Pokemon Go wasn't officially released in Russia, so you couldn't download it from the app stores. Yet, everyone played it. And I mean everyone, in 2016, especially during summer, you couldn't take a walk in the downtown St Petersburg without hearing the Pokemon Go sounds from people's phones. Android users sideloaded apks, iOS users created separate Apple IDs to bypass the geoblock. Suddenly everyone educated themselves to get the thing they wanted.
99% of consumers will stop at step 2. 80% won't have the technical skills to make it past step 1.
But even if 99% of people could figure it out, it'd still be an unnecessary hurdle whose only purpose is to provide Google with an unfair competitive advantage.
Until all of that bs goes away, side-loading and secondary app stores will be nothing more than a hobby for enthusiasts.
Google shouldn't be doing what they're doing, no question. BUT, this reaction to the idea of people downloading apps is over the top. The world is full of people who made lots of money on the back of people downloading and installing their apps, even with far worse UXs than what Android provides.
Minecraft.
Steam.
Heck, every video game ever.
Skype.
Microsoft Office. Made billions when people had to physically go to a store and get it.
Google Earth. Chrome itself.
IntelliJ, any developer tool.
Zoom. WebEx. Most video conf tools, actually.
Any pro tool whatsoever.
You get the picture. No, ticking a box and tapping is not the end of the world and never has been. The UX for app installation on macOS and Windows is totally atrocious in both cases and people figure it out.
If you live in the Valley bubble world where every single app that exists is VC funded and desperately racing to get to a 100M daily actives first, then it might seem like one extra click is literally the end of the world. But FFS the vast majority of all businesses and products require more effort to get than that, and they work just fine.
No major apps have gained traction that way. So unfortunately, those are enough hurdles that this isn't realistic.
thats a huge hurdle for normal people, it means you can't make a business out of selling things that way unless you have an established product like fortnite
> make a business
Well here's your problem
It is not meaningless, but agreed not something for mass use yet. Similarly like 30-40 years ago with personal computing, now also geeks start the paradigm shift into privacy-aware computing.
I guess at some point Google will close the F-Droid loophole in Android and only allow installations through the Playstore anymore. You know, for security reasons... winkwink
Maybe the real reason will be pressure from the government to hurt the ones like Huawei a little more, maybe it will be the need to squeeze more money, or maybe the need for censorship because those evil alternative app-platforms allow whatever unwanted stuff.
> I guess at some point Google will close the F-Droid loophole in Android and only allow installations through the Playstore anymore.
Google standing in Europe is already really shaky. They keep taking fines after fines for abuse of their dominant position. That won't last forever. If they close the ability for other stores to exist, the best case scenario is the EU giving them a huge fine and forcing them to go back. Worst case is being force to split Android out of the main company. Google knows that which is why they will not do it.
Does Europe have the power to split Google? Or does that lie with U.S. regulators?
Google is already split in EU, there are subsidiaries in various countries. Although parent company is in US. EU has no power to split US company, but can apply fines to localy registers subsidiaries when laws are breached.
The other aspect is that Google is now jeopardizing many people who now enable "other sources", making them more susceptible to malware. (Not saying you shouldn't enable "other sources", but many people don't understand what they are doing).
The same was said of purchasing stock options.
Only if your users are really lazy. It's certainly easier to install Element from an Apk then it is to set element up from then on.
That's almost all people in practice.
I use the app to chat with my mom. My mom is not going to install F-Droid or whatever. This comment reminds me of the famous dropbox comment on HN.
There was a time when people did click a download link. Installing APKs are easier than fiddling with most app settings. Think of how Fortnite was distributed via APK when Epic was big enough to tell people how to do it.
I don't deny the utility of app stores. My point was about the freedom of platform at a capability level.
Care to share the famous comment for those not in the know?
iirc, the quote s/he's referring to is approximately "Dropbox won't ever take off because it's just glorified rsync and everyone can already do that", i.e. "everyone" can rsync
Thanks for sharing F-Droid. Don't know how I've missed this so far
Hi there, if you're a small business impacted by this please comment how below, i can raise the issue with congressional representatives via the national small business association. I've seen a couple posts about this already.
From my perspective, decentralized, free and open source software enables and supports a range of small businesses. The replacements for tools like Element are big-tech tools ranging from Whatsapp (Facebook) to Slack (Salesforce).
It seems all those deplatforming started really recently with trump/parler and turned into a witch hunt. It's now totally out of control and we start to look like CCP
We really are seeing the cultural revolution of technology. The era of open innovation and freedom of expression is over. And because both sides of politics can only see as far as the next election, they will just use this to their advantage to deplatform their opponents. And who loses? The proles, of course.
It might be a possible opportunity for alternative platforms to grow.
Before, network effect makes Twitter/Google Store/AWS etc dominant over alternatives, because everybody could be on there. There is no reason to use XXX, because why not Twitter.
Now that they make it clear that they are not unbiased moderator, and they remove apps/people from their platform, a bunch of people become refuge. Alternative stores and social media become viable, because they could grab those audience. I can see that in the next few years, we will have more fractured platforms.
> because both sides of politics can only see as far as the next election, they will just use this to their advantage to deplatform their opponents
Meanwhile, there are other countries.
The coordinated banning of the president of the USA across all mainstream platforms was just the beginning. It's like they were afraid, previously. Now they found out they can deplatform everyone they want and no one can really stop them!
But Google is a private company and can decide who they want to see in their stores. Right?
It's not that simple. Let's say that Google sell a tv half or even a quarter the price of normal tv, but it can only access channels authorized by google, and the authorized channels can change anytime. Furthermore it can only access consoles and devices only authorized by google.
At first, the authorization is very permissive and the unauthorized channels or devices are very rare. People begin to buy the tv, and channels begin to optimize their content around it. Other tv lose their market share, and begin to adapt "google tv" architecture to sell their own to survive.
After 10 years google begin to unauthorize some channels, in prefer to their own which launched 3 years before, as well as consoles in preference to stadia. The ban is same with these similar cases, where it's framed as illegal content, or error. But it's happening often.
Is google in the wrong here? IMO it's debatable.
That was the parent's point - made via sarcasm.
I know, for me it's just an interesting case where there are no clear / definitive answer. Both sides have good arguments and it's hard to determinate who is wrong.
Yes, this legal void needs to end. If you have a majority of some market, there need to be additional legal responsibilities.
No, it started with facebook being myspace with nazis and nudity banned; developed through a few waves of Google search reprioritization and the sanitization of Reddit(i.e. normie 4chan); eventually became open bans of radical Islam, Russian/Chinese political speech and commentary, leading into the Great Youtube Demonetization.
The Trump/Parler ban is largely the chickens coming home to roost; that crowd energetically supported all of this that wasn't personally against them, a lot of the modern US right is second-generation inspiration from the anti-Islam "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy and people like Pamela Geller (long forgotten.) Another anti-Islamic precursor to this has also been the constant anti-Palestinian activism at every university, and a good example of the career direction of the people who energetically participated in that is Bari Weiss, who now cries about cancel culture (which is both real, and responsible for her entire career.)
Now, with all the recently converted lefty Millennials minted over the last two elections still mostly seeing the world through the lenses of Obama Democrats, they've come to agree that the only real problem is that not enough people are censored. That's unanimity from left, right, and center.
In the wake of an unprecedented attack on the core institutions of a democracy; forums and websites that were being used to plot violence against lawmakers are discovering that all available sources of pressure on them to change their behavior are being exercised?
The Parler dudes are just lucky that they haven't been arrested for material support of terrorism yet.
Twitter and Reddit where used as well, chrome, internet ... even electricity ... None of them where shutdown. So IMHO shooting element was too much.
Do you think the CCP is
a) happy about this or
b) unhappy about this
I'll give you three guesses.
They have to be happy on average. It's like being in a race where all the competitors started running in different directions, but eventually finding that the others have turned around to follow your target, effectively giving you a head start.
To spell it out more clearly, here is a great place for one's opponents/competitors to be stuck in - authoritarian enough to eliminate any advantages of liberty, but not authoritarian enough to be efficiently coordinated.
c) not happy nor unhappy, probably they just noticed that US also started to use same recipes to mute any deviant or discordant voices. Next step could be to replicate GFC
I wish Google and Apple are going to be hit with fines and regulation in the EU because of this once the comissioners have better things to occupy themselves with other than the pandemic.
If you look at any legislation that’s been proposed to address this, in the EU or anywhere else, it hasn’t been anything that’s going to make the situation any better. Lots of governments around the world are very upset that these cartels have the ability to restrict people’s access to the internet without any oversight or due process. But that’s not because they think it’s harmful for peoples access to these services to be taken away without any oversight or due process, they just want to be the ones wielding that power.
I'm not talking about acces to the internet but about app store monopoly. It's similar with MS shipping IE bundled with Windows for which they got fined.
Exactly. If a chat service is banned in some authoritarian countries, that's the strongest signal that it is indeed secure.
Widely recognized “authoritarian” countries are hardly the issue here. Western democracies have been trying to usurp this power from the tech cartels for quite a while now. “Hate speech” laws have been successfully normalized in many countries already. The latest push has been to legally regulate “misinformation”. The EU has already started the process of establishing a government authority to regulate the truth. Then again, they’ve been trying to ban E2EE for years as well, so perhaps authoritarianism is the issue...
This is very disruptive to me. Our business chose to use Element because of the privacy and interoperability functions it afforded us through end-to-end encryption and the bridges feature (matrix.org/bridges).
I'm in the same boat here, at least on Android alternatives such as F-Droid exist, however I'm concerned about the repercussions for MDM, as in our case (intune) we go through the Play store.
My largest concern is if Apple follows suit, which could lead to large problems with our employees who use iPhones.
Recently I've been seriously considering finally ditching iPhone because I share the same concern. After all, Apple did the same to another company recently... so we know they are willing.
What other company did they do this to?
I think it started with a P.
Paler, maybe? or Parter?
Google ditched that app too.
If you move from iPhone, where would you go?
I don't really want to go to Android, but as was pointed out above, at least side loading is possible. Everyone still can get Element right now, even though Google has banned it from their store. But if Apple banned it, I'd be immediately unable to get it.
You can use an open source community driven Android build like LineageOS or GraniteOS, if your phone supports it. You can even conpletely degoogle your phone this way :)
I’m seriously considering ditching my iPhones for any Nokia dumb phone. But what we really need is a mobile OS that is really free with no marketing BS, ideally BSD derived.
Like this one? https://pureos.net/ Running on a phone: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Pinephone for a cheaper, less performant alternative: https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...
Unfortunately (since otherwise I’d be using one) both are unusable as practical replacements for Android or iOS.
Once calls/texts work with 100% reliability and it isn't slow as hell I'm going all in :)
Yeah - I don’t even care about calls that much.
Texts, not slow as hell, decent battery life, would do it for me.
You mean Ubuntu touch?
Parlez? Palais? Parley?
We're in the same boat - fortunately we're a small company so it's not going to be brutal to switch if we have to, but we're huge fans of the privacy and encryption features and it would be a disappointment to have to go back to the old standards of Slack or Teams.
It's surprising to me you'd switch to a new platform because of this when it still works on the desktop. You could install it via F-droid or an APK, use alternative frontend app or you could even just use the web interface.
Does this also affect existing installs, or only (attempted) new ones?
Only new ones. At least my installation is still there.
Thanks. That should limit the disruption, at least.
Within a day, Google have removed 100k Robinhood reviews and suspended this application. I wonder if these arbitrary actions will become a daily thing soon.
They already have been, since the very first day of the Apple AppStore (and hence its copycat Play Store). But they typically hit smaller developers with no recourse. Occasionally they hit the “wrong” crowd and shit flies for a few days, until some bigwig goes “okay, I guess these particular cats deserve a pass, just approve and move on.”
Google and Apple stores are like nightclub bouncers. If they don’t like you, you ain’t gonna dance. “Normies” don’t care until the bouncer picks on them.
Some normies simply don't like going to those particular nightclubs because it makes the owners even more powerful and puts money in their pockets.
F-Droid Link:
Element (previously Riot.im) (Secure decentralised chat & VoIP. Keep your data safe from third parties.) - https://f-droid.org/packages/im.vector.app
Aren't some Matrix servers, which Element can connect to, considered "free speech zones" where hate speech and misinformation propagates? If so, expect F-Droid to do the needful to Element like they have before[1].
By the way, "Foxy Droid" does the same job as F-Droid but is much less annoying. Available on F-Droid.
i like g-droid as well since it lets you bookmark apps so you can check them out later
And the app search on G-Droid is so much better than the main F-Droid app.
Off topic, but since you brought it up: what is annoying about f-droid?
It shows all kinds of stuff unrelated to the thing you are trying to do, to the point of making it harder to do the thing.
Something is being missed in these "Element isn't Parler because..." comments. Distinctions about client vs platform do not matter _at all_ to someone at Google headquarters. Content they find unacceptable is accessible, or it's not. Full stop.
The FAANGs now have a strong incentive to boot anything and anyone making objectionable content available in any way because that's the way public sentiment has shifted. It's really incredible to see how quickly the deplatforming chickens came home to roost. We're now shooting ourselves in the feet at Internet speed.
That's still weird though. By that logic, they should ban all web browsers, and mail clients… Content they find unacceptable is definitely accessible through those.
Banning all applications that enable access to non-moderated decentralized content is simply not compatible with a phone being a smart phone.
Apple already does, no real third party browsers. Objectionable content has to go through their webview.
Looking for a reason?
From https://element.io/
"Keeps conversations in your control, safe from data-mining and ads"
I hope more apps start allowing to directly download an .apk file from their website.
I don't have Google Play Services or the Play store installed on my phone nor do I want to install them. Yes, it's my responsibility to update the app, whatever, just give me the file.
Is there a standard that could verify an apk against a certificate? ... or an I just describing building an alternative play store?
This is a (mostly) solved problem in linux. Your package manager has a central repo, but also can have 3rd party repos added. You'd add the matrix repo and it would automatically update it with everything else. It means everything still gets updated and verified against the keyring.
Fdroid supports 3rd party repos.
Android's has an app signing system which isn't dependent on Google Play. Updates to a given app have to be signed with the same certificate as previous versions.
Signal, for instance, does this: https://signal.org/android/apk/
Signal doesn't. They give you a hash not a signature. I.e. if you have control iver their site, you can push a malicious signal application and change the hash.
This is false. The Signal APK is signed with the same signature as the APK on Google Play. If the signature was different then Android would not allow me to overwrite/update my Google Play Signal installation with the APK that I just downloaded from that site.
On Android, APKs are almost always signed by default (even if they're only self-signed).
You can use fdroid which builds everything and signs it with their own keys.
Where do you get the certificate from? If you get the APK and certificate from the same source, there's no security benefit of verifying the certificate on top of having a proper TLS connection.
If you update the application, Android will check that the certificate of the current version matches the one from the update before allowing you to install it.
Or they make F-Droid more known. Publishing apks yourself means you have to implement an update feature. F-Droid takes care of that
How is F-Droid conceptually different from PlayStore? They can ban anything just as well.
You can add your own repositories.
What @throwaway525142 said and you can host your own repo.
Considering their political stance I would not be surprised if they would blocklist some repositories.
Everything is open-source. They block what they want and you can fork it or recompile it. You don't have that same liberty with Google, the Apple Store, Amazon, Samsung, etc.
On the store that you host you can also choose to enforce whichever rules you like.
Plus, they were talking about Gab there. If you think you're going to write the next Gab or... Pander or Flander or whatever that website was that allowed people to plan storming the US capital, then you can still have your own store.
Whats wrong with F-Droid?
It allows only free and open source apps, which might be a no-go for some.
They allow adding alternate repositories, but the ones I've come across have all also only allowed FOSS apps. I wonder if it's a policy any repo has to follow or if it's possible for someone to create a non-FOSS repo too.
Even when you can use a non-free repo, that still leaves the question of payment. Because most who distribute nonfree apps, want money first. I doubt this is compatible with F-Droids architecture.
I might be wrong but I don't think most non FOSS apps authors would be fine with an unwanted third party publishing their software on their repo.
Then how do you get instant messaging notifications?
Through non-google message brokers.
The problem is that this requires a long running background connection.
And guess what Google tried to kill for battery saving purpose since a long time (long running mostly sleeping background processes). But then on Google in difference to Apple it's still possible (but less reliable) with the right setup and fully possible with a "proper" de-googled phone.
So depending on your setup you might either:
- not get notifications
- get them unreliable
- only get them if the app is open
- get them just fine
Also this might change from app to app, there clearly will be apps which will not have any 3rd party notification broker fallback, but given how Google doesn't have 100% delivicery guarantees they still should have (potential delayed) message syncing when the app is open.
I think I don't.
Sometimes I get notifications, sometimes it may take hours for me to get the notification.
I rarely use instant messaging for important things, and when I do, I make sure to check my phone often so I don't miss the messages.
Is this stupid? Maybe, but I'm not going to install Google's closed source crap on a device that I carry almost everywhere. If that means I become a social pariah, then so be it.
"If that means I become a social pariah, then so be it."
Sounds heroic, but maybe does not help anyone? And if you really cannot tolerate closed source, than what kind of hardware do you use? As far as I know, they are allmost all closed and locked.
Pine64 is a fresh breeze, but they are also not free(nor stable) yet.
My workaround is simply, that I have a mobile, where I can remove the batterie, then I know, it is turned off.
I think they should be forced to allow apps running in the background to connect to an arbitrary server, to subscribe to notifications
Its kinda is possible (on some android setups) but unreliable.
Most importantly your app (and server) needs to be build to be able to fall back to a 3rd party message broker. But the common fallback is to just sync messages from time to time in background if the app runs as it's "good enough" for the case Google is temporary down or not available or you are one of the (from the App POV) view people which de-googled their phone.
Both Signal and WhatsApp work fine. It requires workarounds from the app developers, but it's not impossible to implement.
Signal gets round it by sending an empty notification through Google's mandatory firebase service, then sending the actual message from its own service.
I wonder if France will have something to say to Google about this in the EU.. France uses Matrix. Google's powerful, but they're not a legislative body.
France uses Matrix but not Element. They forked it and called it Tchap.
They use their own matrix client : tchap. They also use their own app store (not sure what it's based on) Therefore, French ministry that use matrix may not be affected
> not sure what it's based on
As far as I know it's based on element or at least co-develop by the element so while their "business" should not be affected directly. The secondary affects this will have if it continuous does affect them indirectly I think.
The more worrying think that this is by far not the first time Google (or Apple) have taken down clients to "non http" networks. Sometimes blaming them for content on the network sometimes not saying anything. Which lets be honest is absurd given that they would have to delete all web-browsers using this arguments.
Oh wow, this chat has blown up with messages and I doubt anybody will see this message at this point, but here we go.
During these weeks of being at home and having lots of free time after work, I've been doing _projects_. For a while, I've been reading how people rant about Matrix always on HN, and I finally decided to suck it, install my own home server and try it out by myself.
The installation for sure requires a bit of understanding about DNS and you kind of (if you want things to be simpler) need two servers: one for your root domain and other for your matrix server. If you nail these two things correctly, can wait a bit for the DNS records to spread out in the network, you'll get the matrix federation working quite nicely.
I highly recommend using some of the automated tools, such as the ansible playbook[0] to help you out maintaining the server. It makes setting up the bridges for other chat platforms very easy.
I have to say, having one application for all my chats. The same interface, no need to install five apps to talk with people, this all is so nice. It's definitely worth the trouble, even when with Synapse you need a bit more powerful server, like four gigs of RAM is a good minimum for a server and all the bridges. Now we only need to have an easy way to install the clients, so we can help our not so technologically advanced friends to join. I think Google knows this; how in 2021 people are forming their own communities, outside of the power of the big corporations. Now Matrix is quite technology oriented, it feels like IRC back in the 90s which I really enjoy!
> I highly recommend using some of the automated tools, such as the ansible playbook[0] to help you out maintaining the server
You forgot to link the Ansible playbook you're talking about :)
Of course I did https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
>in the interim there's https://f-droid.org/en/packages/im.vector.app/ but it's a few versions behind.
Honest question: Why is the F-Droid option a few versions behind?
The release process can be quite slow on the f-droid official repository as the signing step is done on an offline machine manually. https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model
Why, when an app is "suspended", Play Store shows 404 as if it never existed?
Can't Google display the app page with some status banner and a reason for suspension while disabling install button, or allow installing last known "approved" version?
Of course they can. They don't want to.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
> Why, when an app is "suspended", Play Store shows 404 as if it never existed?
It's the ever more popular historical revisionism movement.
It's how they implement the memory hole.
Looks like it was indeed due to abusive content:
https://mobile.twitter.com/element_hq/status/135546565011484...
Than it would be logical to suspend all browsers too.
And all messengers that support E2E encryption. I just wrote some abusive content on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in end to end encrypted chats so I expect Google to remove those now also.
And I used google chrome to access 4chan. So google must ban google chrome also.
I wonder if there is a way we place these App Store decisions into the hands of a third party. Either that or break Android away from Google and forbid them from colluding.
Legislation equating these walled gardens as a new kind of monopoly. Legislation making “terms and conditions” less like laws, and less enforceable.
But wouldn’t that bring down most software companies... terms and conditions have some pretty important legitimate uses...
No, software isn’t special, you should be able to buy it just like you buy other things.
What other things? Do you mean not using copyright as the underlying control mechanism?
how do you recoup your investment then when making software? wont everyone just pirate/duplicate it?
"Terms and conditions" often contain more than just restrictions on copying, they can have everything from arbitration clauses, through anti-interoperability clauses, to obligations that go directly against local laws.
That’s not what I was replying to. There are legit uses is terms and conditions... so where should they go?
The GP said software should be bought like everything else... but everything else can’t be easily duplicated and shared... so how will that work?
If I buy an apple, maybe I want to eat it. Perhaps I'd like to smoosh it under my boot. Maybe it goes up me bum. Now what does a magic apple copier have to do with me putting apples up my bum?
You could produce at no cost all the apples and cut out the original apple grower with no upfront costs yourself.
So the problem is: you break capitalism, hard.
It would already help if the rules of the app stores were decided by a parliament. And kicking a provider out of the store requires a court ruling.
That would make legit ban very slow and ineffective tho
Handset makers could start some sort of ... Open Handset alliance, oh wait..that's how we got Android.
Nope. Better alternative would probably be some sort of blockchain thing with reviews baked in and maybe authority nodes (devs with experience) could validate/clear apps from having viruses/etc... or just have a reporting mechanism so apps get pulled when suspicious.
If you think about it, a lot of Google and Apple's power comes from their dominance of the smartphone market.
I hope that mobile computing follows the path of desktop computing, and we end up with more viable small-device OS options.
>suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we're working with them to explain how Element works
What a joke. Does google remove their own messenger platform and email app too when someone uses them to send something naughty?
Report it, and report their browser, and all E2E encrypted messaging apps (Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/cont...
How could this be - I was told our corporate overlords are able to do whatever they'd regarding kicking people off their platforms?
Whatever shall we do?
The funny thing about the whole "do bad things and get kicked off" strategy is that every platform has abusers. Since Big Tech can arbitrarily decide the thresholds and circumstances that lead to being kicked off, this effectively means they can kick anyone off for any reason.
Even on here, on Hacker News, if you dig deep enough I guarantee you can find questionable content (albeit probably downvoted) to justify deplatforming if you were tasked with deplatforming this site anyways.
FYI your comment was dead, and I vouched for it. You might be shadowbanned? Not sure, but regardless you might look into it.
It appears they've also removed Pattle, but Ditto and FluffyChat are still available at this time.
Odd that they'd only remove half of the Matrix clients available...
Wasn't Pattle removed for a longer time? I know the developer stopped working on it some time ago.
Is it maybe because FluffyChat is developed by a German company, Famedly GmbH?
Instead of putting some money into good service in two sided markets, Google is fine with automatized or low effort curation. High visibility post in Hacker News seems to be how errors can be corrected.
Monopoly power in action. There is little pressure to fix this.
It's becoming more and more clear that there's a problem with these corporately-controlled "free markets" that are neither free nor are they markets. It's time for Congress to do more than just write strongly-worded letters to large tech conglomerates hoping that these kinds of anti-consumer practices stop. It's funny (or sad) that the meme du jour is "build your own app store, bro." We need: (1) transparency and (2) accountability.
First of all, we can't have stuff getting arbitrarily censored or kicked off stores, because even though it may start with alt-right QAnon nonsense, it will lead to things like Hey, Epic, Fortnite, Robinhood ratings being scrubbed, WSB being banned, or now Element. The slippery slope is not hypothetical. It's here.
Secondly, we can't just have AAPL, GOOG, FB, etc. merely say "oops, our bad" when the shit hits the fan. People get mad, they say "oops" -- even though the app may have lost thousands of customers and reputation -- and everyone forgets the snafu ever happened. This is not okay, and as consumers we should not be okay with it. I promise you Google will release a statement saying "certain groups" on Element "used some poopoo language" and the apologists will, yet again, be totally cool with it.
(I don't feel my comment is particularly controversial, yet I'm being mass downvoted with no counter-arguments.. weird.)
The Digital Citizen has rights. And its time to draft them.
It's a shame nobody saw this coming fourty years ago and devoted his life to the cause.
The infrastructure is run by private parties -- but since the advent of encryption it ought be possible to lay down some basic principles or precepts of the online denizen. "The Right to be Forgotten" is a strong step in the right direction, but anonymity sometimes makes people act rashly -- which reminds me of the need for Nettiquette. I believe the difficulty comes in guaranteeing backdoors for law-enforcement and crime-deterrence while still affording a strong level of privacy. It's unlikely that law enforcement will simply "get used to" the fact that encryption works and is difficult [and in the case of ECC likely intractable] to decipher. The alternative is state-run applications and tech-companies with cross-sectional presence of politically inclined people, or some weird tryst of tech companies, lobbying, legislation, and law-enforcement that effectively elevates tech companies to governance level without the primary oversight of elections to place them there. If there is a third option I'd love to hear it.
Free software. Guaranteeing backdoors is a terrible strategy that should not even be considered.
I believe it was Franklin who said "The man who sacrifices liberty for security will get neither" (paraphrasing) ... however, it's not a common sentiment among law-enforcement officials who prefer quiet over creativity. You are right that it ought not be considered by sane citizens in a free country, but what do you tell the appointed officials that try so desperately to make it so?
Nothing. If they try to pressure it's inclusion we remove it, if they sneak it in we'll find it. That's the beauty of free software.
Hardware is not so easily audited
A design choice, not a necessity.
Parent is concerned what will happen in the world where we actually exist.
Merely outlining the main antagonistic forces to actual free speech -- I'm more concerned with the weird oligarchic relationship between tech giants and law enforcement that cookie-cuts the electoral process out of the equation ... is that what you were getting at?
"The Right to be Forgotten" is a strong step in the right direction
You mean "The Right to Rewrite History"?
Uh, yeah, as if youtube or any digital screen-based media cannot be instantaneously rewritten or shuffled between visits. Hello "memoryhole" (if you're familiar with 1984)
Nobody named Stallman did. Shame indeed.
It's a mistake to enshrine these companies though. Break out their app store and android division and make them a utility, but don't make google a permanent part of our lives by making them a necessity. I don't want to live in a world where these centralized platforms have a government mandate.
What I want is true competition and laws that make that happen.
Hear, hear!
For the people who see no issues with any of this, shall we shut off their water and electricity too while we're at it?
They can build their own water and electricity!
This notion that your business can evaporate without notice overnight has to stop.
We absolutely need clear legislation on this, this is causing harm and the power asymmetry is monumental.
Also - consider the conflicts of interests: Google Apps would never, ever get treated the same way.
I think it's time to separate app distribution from the devices themselves.
Thank goodness for F-droid.
I totally agree. Last time this happened with an app I use and trust, I rooted my phone and switched to lineageos to allow F-droid auto-updates. Google is not making me want to keep using their services.
Until you find out that the app isn't able to use the google notification service so it puts a persistent notification in your bar and uses more battery.
I was able to easily hide my persistent notification, and still get the actual notifications for messages.
I understand it should use more battery, but my phones still last multiple days even with F-Droid versions of Element and Telegram running 24/7.
One real annoyance is that after upgrading the apps, I need to start them again manually. Otherwise I won't receive any notifications until I do. IIRC with the Google Play versions, the push notifications will arrive and cause the app to start.
I don't use any google services other than youtube at all, but this is hard to justify, even for google.
> We've had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix
If this takedown stands, this effectively means that all distributed message systems are banned from the Play store.
Does not have to be distributed, can be any E2E encrypted also. Signal should be banned, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/cont...
Report them all, if you can't find objectionable content on those, write it to yourself, screenshot it and report the apps.
All browsers too. I've seen a lot of shit it that so called internet.
If anyone needs a download, you can easily install/sideload via f-droid or the app can be trivially built with './gradlew assembleDebug' (provide your own keys to build a release version)
What would be funny is if every developer who has an app in android, were to in a single day submit their own "branded" version of matrix/element.
Basically as a protest. This can have far reaching effects for anyone worried about privacy, walled gardens, competing with social networks, etc...
Is there a guide to doing this safely? As in, protected from malware.
Go to the fdroid website, and download the store.
Alternatively, pull the code from git, and follow the instructions to build the apk.
This is an unfortunate example of a core danger of the app store (or Play Store, in this case) business model.
With devices, by default, configured to make it difficult to install apps directly, the store becomes the single point of failure.
And we engineers know, all too well, the dangers of single points of failure in any business-critical solution.
What well-run fortune 500 company, or government agency, would fully embrace and build a key business process around apps which can be made to vanish on the whim of an Apple or Google employee who takes issue with how someone fully disconnected from your organization (and maybe even in a different country) uses the same app you have rolled out to thousands of staff members?
In my opinion, the next logical step in “decentralization” of technology is to give mobile device users the same application control, logging, and monitoring powers over their devices that desktop, server, and notebook users have always enjoyed.
Does anyone else here see another logical path?
Perhaps a little cynical but what would stop Google from classifying praising other search engines as "hate speech" and deleting any comments in this direction from their platforms? And when "hate speech" is just a little too absurd then they just classify it as "security risk" and ban it as well.
Use F-Droid - An app repository ("store") for Free Software apps:
Naturally, it has the Element app.
This is basically the last straw for me. The past week has made it perfectly clear that Big Tech will close the circle and protect their own. Anything that appears to be censorship resistant, that allows the little guy to get ahead and compete, or that allows individuals to have greater levels of privacy and freedom, will be shut down and de-platformed.
As was predicted in 1948, "hate speech" has just become a smoke and mirrors term. Facebook and Discord used this excuse to deplatform WSB. Twitter uses this to deplatform people left, right, and center. And now Google is using it deplatform one of the few decentralised projects I had a lot of faith in.
From Alex Carey in 1995: "The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy”
> I had a lot of faith in.
I wouldn't give up faith in Matrix yet. Remember, there are other clients, and there is always the Element web client.
I suspect that Google will eventually get Matrix clients right. It's really no different than an email client or web browser. Element is *not* a content community it's a communication client app. As a customer, I do not want Google regulating my communication software clients for content. That is my job as a user.
Wait until CBDCs roll out. Right now, it is your speech and communication. Tomorrow, it will be accessing your money. Then they will have their desired perfectly obedient population.
I've thought CBDCs ensure the opposite? Currently if you have an uninsured account at a bank, and the bank goes bankrupt, your money is gone. With CBDCs it seems to me that the money is truly yours instead of in a currency pegged to the fiat but that can always break.
I live in US and we have had FDIC as long as I remember. I'm not even sure there is such a thing as "uninsured account" in US, or if there are, why would anyone use such a bank.
It's a simple equation to grok: if utility X is only available in a digitized form on a controlled and centralized platform, then that utility is subject to central controls. And as we see, these control mechanisms will inevitably require AI moderation to scale.
You think things are bad when Google arbitrarily kicks you off gmail? Wait until it happens to your bank account. Who are you gonna call? Where are you going to go and speak out about it?
I guess it all depends on how it's implemented and what the censorship policy is. If it's implemented with a "everyone, including the homeless, felons and racists gets access" mindset then there isn't much concern. If it's implemented with a "having access is a privilege not a right" mindset, it's different.
USPS has to service everyone, even those where they don't make any money with. If this FDIC thing is more like the USPS, your concerns would be unfounded.
USPS only services people who have a residence or pay a fee to have a box. Homeless people require a special approval to receive mail. So USPS does not have to service everyone, but at least they can’t ban people based on mail content.
No, with distributed cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin money is yours. With CDBCs your wallet is managed by your government and not you.
> This is basically the last straw for me.
Now you're just out of straws, or pulled the trigger on some decision? What's the implication?
I imagine if you wanted to 100% stop buying or using products from FANNG (+Microsoft & Twitter) it would be impossible without doing anything short of living completely off the grid.
Imagine, you ditch your smartphone. You switch to Linux. You stop using _search engines_ because all of them use Google or Bing in the backend. You abandon Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, GitHub, and Gmail. Before you go to a website, how do you know if they are going to load an asset from AWS or GApps? Maybe the server loads an asset from AWS and redistributes it to you, so you can’t just blacklist IPs. How do you know if your Bank’s ATMs are using AWS? Or your hospital’s digital records? Eventually someone you do business with will do business with FANG and you’ll be indirectly supporting them.
I don't believe in "vote with your wallet" kinda dogmas. I mean watch the news right now..
We need regulation and government investment in open tech and software. The App/Play Store are anti-competitive, but Apple and Google have a Duopoly in the mobile market. There can and should be rules regarding this. I don't see how they should be even allowed to profit off these markets. Like at all. Every app there increases the value of their platforms by itself.
Even if you use F-Droid, you then have to compromise on security deeply embedded into the Android OS.
Platforms should be allowed to be repairable, open and documented and users should be allowed to do whatever they please with them.
The market won't fix this. You need to become politically active.
I’m not typically one to “vote with my wallet”, and I think it’s very impractical to do so with all of big tech.
I do however tend to buy products and services that align with my values and shy away from products and services that go against my values. For example, I’d be more inclined to buy a Tesla and install home solar panels then I would be to buy a VW because Tesla is emissions free and VW lied on their emissions tests. VW lost some long term customers because of that incident and Tesla is continuing to attract new buyers that are concerned with climate change. Due to this trend we are able to deploy more electric vehicles then government regulations require.
Tesla right now is ignoring worker rights in Germany. They will learn like Wallmart before, that you cannot roll the same shit here, as you do in America.
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet. You really do not need to prefer either of those companies for anything but the products they sell. Your decision does not matter.
What matters is single entities like Musk, VW, Bezos, Wallstreet and Gates not having the undemocratic mandate to form the world to their liking, "good" or bad. Nobody should have that much power.
If you want to change the world with money, invest in those who consider having 100$ or 1000$ more or less life changing. Pay for FOSS, invest in local communities. Strengthen the collective.
I have been actively trying to distance myself from unnecessary technology, and especially that which is owned and controlled by Big Tech. I now use a "dumbphone". I have begun slowly migrating to ProtonMail. I have already been using Linux as a main OS on desktop. I do still use a Macbook Pro only because the 2015 version I have just won't die (touch wood), but my next laptop purchase would be with the aim of installing Linux (high-end Thinkpad perhaps). I don't use any form of social media, but instead arrange social events through phone calls, texts, and email. None of this has made my life more difficult. On the contrary, I talk to people more often, commit to more social engagements, and feel more in control of my digital life. I highly recommend everybody to at least try some of these things!
> will close the circle
Precisely. Even if they are acting in good faith, their current set of rules would make them ban internet if it was to be created now.
>This is basically the last straw for me.
So are you going to switch to a GNU/Linux phone, Librem 5 or Pinephone?
Nokia dumbphone!
What’s its advantage over a Linux phone with kill switches?
Depends what your goal is. I also wanted to detox from too much smartphone use, so half the reason was to help with this. A Linux phone, while great in other areas, wouldn't have helped with that. Maybe I'll try out some kind of Linux phone when I venture back into smartphone territory.
As always, the Four Horsemen were acted upon first. Only this time around it is "actual Nazis" (not actual Nazis, no matter how much "literally shaking" was done). And who could defend that? (The ACLU, and the left, should have, we all should have) And complaining about it is obviously the slippery slope fallacy (or the camel's nose in the tent) so it can be ignored until it is just too late. And now there's a whole series of well-honed defenses ("it's a private company!" "go make your own!" "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences") ready to back up these bold moves, along with the handily-set precedent.
Whatever shackles are being forged against your worst enemy, do not be surprised if they end up on your wrists at some later date.
Now I have one reason more to continue to develop a matrix client for Plasma Mobile.
If I get to work with matrix and element io plasma mobile I'm ordering a device next day.
NeoChat does work on Plasma Mobile but it is still missing a few features to be production ready. https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/23/announcing-neochat-1.0-the-...
I'm currently working on encryption support in the base library: https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/pull/443 and once this is done the other big missing feature are notifications.
Thank you for your work on that
Just a reminder you can install the APK and there's nothing they can do about it.
Not a friendly experience, but not insanely hard either.
Not if you're using outlook with certain configurations that require disabling sideloading. Also they're really torquing down on the API and making it harder and harder to build useful apps outside the play store. I'm not an android developer but my understanding is that notifications are starting to look much more like iOS for example.
Check https://matrix.org/clients/ for alternatives. You cannot take down the matrix network by blocking one app.
Again the giants overplay. But when does the hammer come down upon them that they like to so wield?
Remember,
Competitors on youtube do this all the time to take down competitive content.
E.g. false flags of inappropriate content or copyright to take down videos or channels.
This is a good situation for big players, because there will always exist a real or fake excuse to take down any potentially competitive threat.
Also, unfortunately this system aligns with the goals of our political system that wants to have a one stop shop for surveillance of ‘law breakers’.
Google Play Store takedown and appeals process is so embarrisingly bad and so easy to fix. 1) give people notice and the chance to respond in most cases before the takedown or put the app back up if an appeal is filed until the appeal is reviewed. 2) allow attachments on the appeals form. They only allow 1,000 characters, which is just not enough for most cases. 3) staff the team so you can reply within 48 hours. Currently, the average seems to be about 10 days. 4) Have a way to see the takedown reason I'm the developer portal. If you appeal, see the appeal was received and is in process.
None of these things take materially more resources from google. Some junior PM should be able to make this better, and it would save google a lot of antitrust concerns. Something like 1M a year would probably do it.
I have never used element, but i just went to the apple app store and downloaded it before they strike it also. it was on my "when i get around to it" list. Well seems like now is the time to get around to it. Seem that i do that more and more often these days.
I think all this App banning stuff will fuel the interest of open source platforms like Pinephone.
The Element app is back in the Google Play Store: https://twitter.com/element_hq/status/1355677158174322688
Let people decides what is wrong and what is correct. Not big tech, not platform creator.
Stop using apps whenever you can.
Use your browser.
Which one? The one also made by Google, the one paid for by Google, ones of those based on the one made by Google, or the one made by the other smartphone OS owner with a walled garden?
I will bite: Firefox, the one that cares about privacy and open standards, even if it has a lot of income coming from a search bar deal with Google.
...and doesn't care about deplatforming.
"We need more than deplatforming"
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
The title of the article is bad, but the actual suggestions for action against extremism are quite good.
We do need research to fix social media, and we do need transparency.
Firefox is generally good; they have some identity politics, but it hasn't taken over their ethos.
That post sounds quite skeptical of the way the deplatforming was handled, and the power of sites to arbitrarily deplatform. Can you be more specific about your actual objection?
Don't pretend like you're patronizing them. You're using a free browser. There's nothing they've done or can do to affect your experience within the browser, and it still remains an open browser. There's no moral hangups here beyond the ones you imagine for yourself.
If I'm not patronizing them, who is? Why would a browser want to get into the censorship business?
Google is, and people purchasing their other products are. You and I are at best enjoying the fruits of their labour.
>Why would a browser want to get into the censorship business?
Is having an opinion getting into a business now? It was a pretty bad article and I don't care for it, but please explain how they're "getting into the censorship business".
I think he covered that by 'the one paid for by Google' as the main income for Mozilla is the default search engine deal.
But I agree, FF is the best
Here's a short list of some browser engines that are not based on google's or paid for by google:
Webkit: [1] It's a thousand times easier to compile and was the original base for chromium
Servo: [2] This is much more recent, I haven't looked lately (until today) but it looks to be making rapid forward progress
Elinks: [3] and friends, these are more capable than you'd think (hackernews works, even if you don't build it with javascript enabled.)
Also it's surprisingly easy to write your own engine, it's just keeping up with some of the more political stupidity/abuse is hard.
“Surprisingly easy to wrote your own engine”
Could you explain that part to me because because I’d guess at at least 150 man-years to get a PoC.
Servo was started at 2012 and I think it had full time employees so it’s at least 8 man years to get to that state (I’d guess it was a lot of people in the team, but as a minimum).
The browser can not do push notifications when the device is locked. Which is kind of a core feature for IM.
I would say the exact opposite. Do not use your browser, use a native application whenever you can.
It's only a matter of time until they start banning browsers for not blocking certain websites. It's the exact same logic.
Does someone know why f-droid versions tend to be 'few versions behind'?
Push vs pull perhaps. F-droid packagers need to a) notice there's a newer version and b) implement the change of packaging a newer version. Plus whatever additional process they might have to keep things from breaking.
Element's developers just upload a newer version to Play themselves as part of the release.
Quote: "Meanwhile, if it's urgent and you're comfortable installing unsigned APKs, you can grab the latest build from our CI at..."
AFAIK you can still sign it even if you don't publish it via playstore
I wonder, would there be value in publishing a separate incarnation of Element that does not provide any default Matix servers? It would require you to type the server URL or follow a link from the browser
Good to see Element back.
I want to mention that Fedilab [1] and Subway Tooter [2], two famous apps used for Mastodon (or ActivityPub), a decentralized social network, had also been taken down by Google Play with the same reason.
One of the reasons I really like Element is the fact that it runs completely in the browser, no need to install a native app - which, lets be realistic, is really only a viable option (for the average consumer) if you submit to the proprietary App Store or Play Store. Sadly, Element Web is not yet responsive, but I hope that changes soon so that it can be finally free from the constraints of the constraints of proprietary native platforms like iOS and Android.
It's still early days, but https://hydrogen.element.io works well on mobile
A lot of people seem to believe that there’s much more to this than there really is.
Google has hired a bunch of 28 year old kids in HR and PR, that never used Usenet, that never used IRC, that barely remember AIM, that had a smartphone before they had their own laptop, that don’t understand the internet or technology.
And they’re the ones making these decisions. There aren’t rooms full of Google PMs and programmers and engineers debating the implications. It’s 3 or 4 kids in-between the ages of 24 and 34, and that room is increasingly technically illiterate, and increasingly unable to imagine an internet before (or after) FAANG hegemony.
This isn’t Google being evil to protect advertising dollars, or to kill Matrix, etc.
It’s google hiring young, unimaginative, uninteresting social justice warriors. We’ve taken for granted that most of the people working in FAANG have been using computers for longer than these companies existed. That’s no longer really the case, and the attitudes of these companies are going to continue to change further and further from the unique values that the industry used to represent. In ten years it’s going to be worse, and in 30 it’s going to be unrecognizable.
If you want to get away from those sort of 28 year olds - go work in core engineering for an ISP. The sort of persons who are entrusted with admin access on the big, expensive, vitally critical Cisco and Juniper boxes that run a medium to large sized ISP are pretty much the opposite of the raised-on-shiny-GUI persons you describe.
However I think it's unfair to say that people under age 40 are 'social justice warriors'. They've been raised in a bubble of superficial user interfaces and have never been forced to encounter the fundamental underpinnings of the software and Internet.
I'm in that age bracket, I remember the open internet. I wouldn't get super ageist about it, but I think the point still stands. Google just wants to believe the internet is for megacorps and everyone who isn't on a mega platform doesn't belong connected to it.
There are plenty of people under 30 more of the "hacker" æsthetic, who independently adopt Linux and have a seething contempt for social media and streaming titans and data hoard and play Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes and what have you.
Some of them are even in the disaffected, alt-right or anti-SJW crowd[0] (but those are generally more like under 20, I think).
The ones who live on their phones and Macbooks and don't understand technology are normies, of which there are more since CS has become much more popularized and pop-culturally embraced, I think. There's plenty of those in their 50s and above, too, just less-so at FAANGs.
I am around 25, and I remember all that and loved it. I miss it terribly. I do not like this trend and direction. Quite scary, to be honest.
TL;DR: Google has likely delegated policing everyone's PCs to a handful of incompetent children and that should make you feel less worried.
Smartphones are bad. "Apps" are bad. OS vendors using their position to change public behavior is bad. (this last idea something the courts in most countries agree on.)
You need to get this stuff out of your life, it's beyond coke levels of harmful.
You have a point, but it's not entirely that. For one, the boomers are the ones who still own everything, and they've never given over leadership roles down to the next generations.
There's a combination of a certain subset of millennials who are like this, and the leadership that doesn't care and wants everything to go their way (as it always has).
A large part is also that the mainstream internet is still so new, and people are so poorly educated that they don't understand that they're the bad guys.
Not unlike the CCP.
It's a second comment in this thread like this. I'm not a native speaker and it's hard to tell whether CCP is supposed to be:
- CCCP a cyrillic of SSSR?
- CCP, Chinese Communist Party?
- CCP, the cyclic something peptide, which is a top websearch hit for me?
Chinese Communist Party
This just made me install Element right away and finally get away from Signal (and of course Whatssap) and bring as many people with me as possible
Facebook & Twitter found that they must trap people there. The flood to Parler that caused Parler to the top of Apple/Android App Stores made them block free speach.
Matrix app. Discussions on what to do about Telegram / Signal. Blocking Parlor.
Citizens can only challenge the establishment around a rigged economy if citizens have a place for free speech. FB/Twitter enable censorship.
So what happens if people start flagging Google chat products as abusive? Will Google pull its own apps? Probably a big fat no.
I was so close to proposing moving off of Slack and onto something like Element/Matrix. Unfortunately this will be a harder sell to my management considering Google or Apple can just shut down any chat client businesses use.
This is ridiculous.
One take away that this has on me, is that with Google and Apple controlling content on mobile phones, it might be impossible to have a truly decentralized application. I believe that Apple should be required to allow 3rd party installs if the user so chooses. If there is an example of monopolistic behaviour this is one for sure.
What is Element?
The chat client of Matrix
One of many. matrix.org/clients
What is matrix? Like the movie? Or the math thing?
It's basically (IRC + XMMP) 2.0.
... but in which typical client sessions look like Slack sessions, and the clients are typically heavy and slow and you would not enjoy running them on weak hardware :-(
There are a number of different clients to choose from, including web-based, electron-based, native, terminal: https://matrix.org/clients/
> web-based
The browser is a resource hog :-(
> electron-based
Essentially a browser under the hood, but separate from your actual browser :-(
> native,
I tried a few of those last year, and had all sorts of trouble, but I guess it's time to give them another shot! Can any of them be made to behave and look like IRC chats? Not screens full of mostly white space?
IIRC however - Element is not a native client.
> terminal
That's good :-)
The fact that Google needs to have Matrix explained to them is, frankly, appalling. I would expect an organization the size of Google would have someone there who's familiar with these not-uncommon federated networks. Or, you know, just stuff that's trendy in general within the tech crowd.
Google is so big that one head doesn't know what the other is doing. Some people probably do know what Matrix is, but that doesn't mean the right people do.
It's still a big problem that Google isn't even making the effort to investigate big apps on their own platform to get familiar with them (before letting the AI loose on them).
While we have found a way to establish and execute rules in the real world (legislature and jurisdiction) we have completely forgotten that we need something like that in the digital world as well.
And now a few VPs of Google and Apple dictate who's allowed to bring in their apps into their holy app store.
> While we have found a way to establish and execute rules in the real world
You are assuming that states legislate primarily in the public interest. I disagree. Public pressure can influence legislation, but fundamental interests of ruling classes usually take precedent.
> we have completely forgotten that we need something like that in the digital world as well.
We have not "forgotten" something which is a claim, or opinion (and which I do not share).
A thought.. the Samsung Galaxy app store never removed the game Fortnite when Google and Apple both did for financial reasons. Perhaps Element could also become one of the apps there.. there's a lot of Samsung devices out there in the world.
Sigh. These kind of things, as well as the Signal outage, are not helping efforts to help people switch to better messaging alternatives. It nicely illustrates the centralisation of power though.
I wonder what stuff like this does for the French government who rely on Matrix (and presumably element?). Sure they have their own servers and maybe another client.
at least they are not called 'riot' anymore. i can imagine a lot of people might have thought it was an app for organising riots or something
A name which Google isn't familiar with (Riot, as opposed to Element) is a possible reason they were suspended in the first place.
Any reason why the F-Droid version is behind the official one?
I mean, you should now have learned that you can't rely on one single distribution channel.
The same reason that software is outdated in many GNU/Linux repositories. F-droid is a repository that builds all software from source on a different schedule than every individual application developer, the google play store is just a platform where the application developer uploads the binary.
Mattermost next? Or is Element different somehow?
Not sure if it makes a difference in this case, but mattermost isn't federated.
It actually stands a chance, perhaps.
Question: did this action "only" stop the sales of apps, or did it also break already-installed or even running apps?
It's incredible that they still host web browsers and email clients with these kinds of policies in place.
Quit taking part in monopoly stores
You can use fdroid to install it. Maintained there by Matrix itself as it is free software.
I am going to install Element with F-droid or manual APK load on principle now. Fuck this.
The fight has started..
Luckily theres other clients available too. Client diversity is important
Every Single Day I am leaning more towards non-App Store distribution model.
Google invested billions into the development of Android when no one else stepped up to do it. They are fully within their rights to protect their investment and fully control the Android ecosystem to their own benefit.
Opt out. No Google. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Amazon. You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them.
You can't change how they operate. But you can change how you operate.
> You don't need them, you might even enjoy life more without them.
So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all?
>You can't change how they operate.
Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.
>So I should probably lower the quality of my life to make a statement that will have no impact on them at all?
God forbid we "lower the quality of our lives" for such lowly things as principles!
>Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.
Else what, you'll vote for another party? Both parties (in the US) take money from Big Tech, and they vote the same shit anyway. That will "show them" nothing. Especially since their stance on such laws is 1/100 of the things you vote a party/candidate about (so you will still vote for them if you agree on other matters).
America is hopeless here, much better to try and fight them elsewhere.
EU gave us GDPR popups, so, not sure there is hope there.
I quit Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Instagram and Facebook. My life has never been better. Minor inconvenience does not outweigh major improvements in my mental wellness.
(Edit: I mention mental wellness because those products, and the ads they carry, are designed to be addictive.)
So let me ask you a question, how were they negatively impacting your mental wellbeing? I ask this genuinely, because I have a tendency to feel these tools only negatively impact people who use them in stress-creating ways. That, however, feels like victim blaming. There's a difference between a using a circular saw dangerously and a circular saw that is MADE with electrical failures that shock you. Let me give the example of MY use so you can contrast it for me to help me understand.
I use GMail, Google Search, Youtube Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook.
I'm not thrilled about FB but it lets me keep tabs on friends. Sometiems I interact with a few people who are friends but sucked in by a lot of the disinformation around, so I try to engage with them sometimes but not often. I also spend maybe 15 minutes a day on it, tops.
Twitter never stresses me, I don't follow toxic people, just friends, entertainers, tech people and such. Again, maybe 15-30 minutes a day, tops.
I get a lot of satisfaction from Youtube, I even pay for premium so I don't get ads, and follow a bunch of great creators.
Amazon's pricing and delivery are great. that makes me happy. I just make sure not to by crap/scam products and I'm good. I use Amazon Music every day, and their video streaming is great too (although they need to stop changing the name).
Google Search is by far the best, IMO, and saves me hours every day.
I have my personal domain go to gmail, and it makes managing ages of email a breeze.
So I can't see a way in which ditching any of those would benefit me, and aside from Facebook, I feel NOT using them would cause me more stress, or less enjoyment.
I'd love to know how you find leaving them has benefitted you.
Google reads your e-mails to develop its ads. Psychological profiles are collated from every click you take on each of these platforms and pulled into ad brokerships. The people that are hired to do this profiling often have crossovers into government sectors, as this is just another form of surveillance. I am personally shocked (not necessarily appalled) at anyone feeling OK with this level of scrutiny being applied to themselves at all the times by government bureaucrats, or companies just looking to make a buck off of your behavior without you even knowing. We're past the point where anyone can claim ignorance of these facts.
Another example regarding Google and more precisely Youtube. When my daughter was younger we created an account on a smart TV and watched a few videos for kids on a newly created Youtube account... Over time I realised that they tweak recommendations in such a way that kids are presented with highly addictive (and sometimes borderline disturbing) content. With kids content it is more obvious, but the same is true for adult users, even though the "addictiveness" aspect tends to be more nuanced. A couple of years ago there was a TechCrunch article that talked about this topic: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/12/i-watched-1000-hours-of-yo...
> Google reads your e-mails to develop its ads.
Why do I care? That's the implicit bargain, I get a free service in exchange for ads. I don't care about the ads, they don't show up in my actual mail feed, just on the side so they're easy to ignore/block.
> Psychological profiles are collated from every click you take on each of these platforms and pulled into ad brokerships.
Why do I care? We build profiles of every person we meet in our heads. I'm a very open person.
> The people that are hired to do this profiling often have crossovers into government sectors, as this is just another form of surveillance.
Again, why do I care? I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I truly do not care if people know I looked at new Kias, or I use Old Spice deodorant. I don't find any of that information being out there harmful to me.
> I am personally shocked (not necessarily appalled) at anyone feeling OK with this level of scrutiny being applied to themselves at all the times by government bureaucrats, or companies just looking to make a buck off of your behavior without you even knowing. We're past the point where anyone can claim ignorance of these facts.
It's not that I'm ok with it, I simply don't CARE. It doesn't impact me in a negative way. There is no human out there looking at my buying/watching habits and taking notes, passing them on to men in trees with binoculars plotting to abduct me. There are machine learning algorithms using them to suggest things I might buy, or might want to watch on TV. They're right sometimes, so I actually get some value out of it.
I don't make it easy, I opt out of everything I can, but I also don't really care as long as I can not hook my TV to the network to avoid Samsung's built-in ads which is offensive bullshit and SHOULD be regulated, then I'm ok. When I go out into the world, I don't have any rights to who can see me who what they can learn about me, it's the same online. As long as I have the power to control what comes into my home, that's what matters. Outside, or out on the internet at large, I'm on someone else's property, and if I don't like their rules, I can leave.
There's a difference between watching me in public and forcing me to do things. One is your right which doesn't harm me, and the other is NOT your right because it CAN harm me.
That's creepy and all but I thought we were talking about mental well-being?
This is the classic advertising doesn't work on me mentality.
Whether you realise it or not, the algorithms behind these services are having a subtle impact on you and show you things for various shady reasons. For me, that was enough just to ditch those services.
It's good to see that you're limiting your exposure to them though.
To be honest, advertising DOES work on me, but only insomuch as it alerts me to potential things. I presume all ads are lies, and research the thing before I by. I have a strong anti-authority reflex and trust VERY little (if anything) on face value. I don't even trust myself. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
> I don't even trust myself
But you trust yourself so much that "advertising DOES work on me, but only insomuch as it alerts me to potential things"
That sounds a bit contradictory to me. (I think I could describe myself somewhat like you did in the latter part, and I still have absolutely no illusions that ads would not be able to get me. So I just actively try to avoid them. And I do not need or want anyone to alert me on potential things. Even further, I try to live by the principle of never, ever making any kind of commercial transaction with anyone where I have not been the intiator of the communication.)
Well, I stated that it queues my interest, then I research it understanding it's probably not as good as it looks. I'm not sure I agree that's contradictory. I'm not saying they don't succeed in attracting me, I'm saying I don't buy based on ads.
The fact that you do not seem to believe that ads may be able to affect your behavior beyond your analytical research is the thing that is contradictory with you not trusting yourself. Or at least that is something I can't trust myself, even if I also happen to think I am beyond ads. But based on my observations in the society and other people, ads are way, way too powerful for me to trust my non-lizard brain here. So I just try to not give my lizard brain the ad exposure at all.
> This is the classic advertising doesn't work on me mentality.
Only if you're massively moving the goalposts.
The claim wasn't anything about "subtle impact" or "shady reasons". It was about whether those services are causing major stress and problems.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
> how were they negatively impacting your mental wellbeing?
I think the answer to your question is obviously very personal and will change from an individual to another.
For me personally the stress came in 2 forms:
* Outrage/politics, especially on Twitter and Reddit. On Twitter, it's impossible to escape this, even if you carefully sanitise the list of those who you follow, due to the trending section being visible to everyone. On Reddit, if you visit the site while you are not logged in, again you will see all of the above.
* Time sink. The worst offender here was Youtube. E.g. "I need to do X in my aquarium let me just quickly double check that video by Aquarium Co-op" - 2 hours later (spent watching "recommended next" videos) I would realise "wow I just wasted 2 hours of my life". Note that I can still quickly view a video without having an account, but due to not having followlists and such, the recommendations are less addictive. Facebook and Instagram were also a time sink and unlike Youtube they weren't really useful in any obvious way, except maybe a couple of Facebook Groups I was part of (e.g. my daughter's school parents group where I could get some news about the school - I now subscribe to their newsletter instead).
* Instigating compulsive spending, e.g. Amazon - this is quite obvious due to it being an e-commerce website and knowing well what you're thinking to buy. I now shop on local retailers whenever possible and as a last resort on eBay, since at least it is less pervasive - unlike Amazon which entices you to take advantage of the rest of their ecosystem e.g. Prime Video or Kindle or Twitch, then "follows" you in all those places with tracking ads.
> Google Search is by far the best, IMO, and saves me hours every day.
If you use Duckduckgo, you can add !sp at the end of your search, and you will get proxied Google results. You don't need to have a Google account for that.
> I have my personal domain go to gmail, and it makes managing ages of email a breeze.
Having a personal domain is a great first step, well done! I didn't have it so I had to setup an "out of office" message, warning everyone that my Gmail address would be deactivated soon...
I reddit daily, I like it a lot. I just gloss over the propaganda crap there, on twitter, facebook, etc. When I want to do politics for real, I do actual fact-based research (as opposed to "my facebook friend watched a youtube video about chemtrails!"). I personally find it easy.
Youtube CAN be a time sink, but so can movies, books, and music. It's my responsibility to manage my time, but I appreciate that it makes it easy to find content I WANT rather than crap.
I grew up dirt poor, homeless twice before I was ten. I make 6 figures now because I work hard, I'm good at what I do (and also because being a white male in America is very useful), and because I know how to spend and not to spend. Good tea is worth it, grocery store milk and butter are fine. A good car is essential, it should work well and look nice, but I'm not buying a Mercedes ever. I have an $1,000 TV that I got for $450 because I love to bargain hunt like some people like to actually hunt.
I don't _generally_ care about remarketing ads, as long as they don't go on for months. My biggest problem is when I see ads for three weeks AFTER I BOUGHT THE DAMN THING.
So I can go to Duck Duck Go, get Google results, but without the benefit of having a profile to determine what's most likely more relevant to me? That doesn't sound useful. I LIKE that Google says, "hey, the last three things he searched were actors in the same TV show, I bet when he's typing a name it's probably related to that same show." I like that Google knows if I search "stars fell on alabama" the chances I want the lyrics to the Frank Sinatra song are 100%. That's beneficial to me.
I have a personal domain for vanity reasons, and also control, yes. If I decide to leave, it's on my terms.
I applaud you for being in charge of your own life, I think I am too. I will say, however, that I think you probably concern yourself with the concept of privacy than me. I'm not a big "what if" person, not a big existential question person. To me, privacy was ALWAYS a lot less encompassing than we ever thought, and at the same time, no one cares about us nearly as much as we think they do. Do FAANG know a lot about me? Yep. but I don't care, because they don't care about me, I don't matter to them. I'm a line in a database, nothing more.
My life philosophy is, "The universe wants to kill me. Eventually it will. My priority is prolonging the magic." That doesn't include worrying about how many databases know I like BSG, Sinatra, Mountain Dew, and liberal politics.
> I applaud you for being in charge of your own life, I think I am too.
Oh of course, I never suggested otherwise! We all have different priorities, and also our heads all work in different ways.
But, I wanted to make it clear that, if one has moral exceptions, then they can quit those services and be OK. Many are under the impression that they could not possibly live without X or Y, that's the idea I wanted to dispel.
>So let me ask you a question, how were they negatively impacting your mental wellbeing? I ask this genuinely, because I have a tendency to feel these tools only negatively impact people who use them in stress-creating ways.
They use highly optimized and self-optimizing techniques and psychological tricks (including A/B testing, consulting experts in cognition, using dark patterns, and everything) to get you hooked on dopamine hits, make you jealoush of your timeline peers, anger you, milk your engagement etc.
The idea that "I'm different, these ads don't work on me" is basically the 21st century version of "I'm not addicted can't quit anytime" of the drug addict (not to mention that it's not just ads, but the feed that's problematic, from reasons that range from echo-bubbling to comparing yourself to 1000s of people you don't know but are your "friends" -- and even with actual friends, people used to have less visibility to their spending habbits, vacation photos, etc, not share everything including pics of their branch).
It's very possible I AM different. I have an insanely high tolerance for alcohol and most drugs (legal and otherwise). I've had situations where I was prescribed vicodin for months at a stretch, and when the pain was gone, half a bottle sat in the drawer until I threw it out (TMJ neuralgia and gallstones leading to gallbladder removal). If I don't look at FB for a day or two, I feel no compulsion to look at it. Sometimes I don't open twitter for weeks. I use them to fill time in the bathroom or waiting on the wife. Maybe I'm just disproportionately well-balanced. I've had incredible hard times throughout my life, so maybe I just understand what's actually important better than the average bear.
I completely agree with the echo-chamber effect, but I also don't feel Facebook or Twitter are actually good sources for political discourse or information so I'm not exactly trusting anything I see there. I think cable news is far more "addictive" and mood-warping than Facebook, though. It's totally passive, you just sit there and absorb the anxiety-laden "coming up in just minutes, how some politician is literally trying to kill you and your family with new regulations on ocean cargo ships! After these ads."
Yes, they absolutely want to boost engagement and use. Yes, they use tested algorithms to select content appealing to you. Yes, some of them even have sleazy policies on content and ads. Some types of content and some types of personalities lend themselves well to that type of information dissemination, especially right-wing content due to the more conformist/authority-pleasing nature of those mentalities. Do I think Facebook and Twitter actually want to make me angry at people? No. People that use FB and Twitter for propaganda reasons do, but that's what propaganda from any source is meant to do, highlight differences between groups and increase inter-group tension to reinforce tribal identity.
But, you didn't actually answer my question. I asked how they affected YOU, not what the goals of these platforms are. I want to hear how they actually affected a person, not how they might affect groups. I'd really like to know how Google and Amazon fit in there too. Again, feel like it boils down to "maybe you shouldn't be so affected by people you don't know and ideas you haven't checked" but also again I don't want to victim blame. I also don't generally like blaming tools for problems, so I'm trying to get more data.
You might or might no be that different.
But it's worth to note that most people are delluded in this regard, thinking they're different. Besides "different in tolerance" and "hookable" are not entirely contradictory. One might resist Vicodin and fall for social media echo- bubbling for example, the same way some can resist alcohol, but fall for drugs or food at obesity-level, and so on. In other words, some are different in the set of tolerances, but still human, in that they have their soft spots.
>But, you didn't actually answer my question. I asked how they affected YOU, not what the goals of these platforms are.
That would still be asking the wrong question. We don't live in isolated fishbowls. What negatively affects others also affects me (that's not even to mention the direct harm to my family, relatives, and friends, I'm speaking in more general community terms).
Yes I agree, the main point that led me to quit is that all of those services are created to "maximise screen time", in other words designed to be addictive.
> I have a tendency to feel these tools only negatively impact people who use them in stress-creating ways
I came to the same conclusion. It is much easier to blame some internet website (which is basically just some pixels on a screen) instead of figuring out internal psychological reasons for being addicted. If a person is looking for addictions, they will find them. If it won't be facebook, it will be porn, binge-watching, sugar, compulsive excercise, compulsive talking, etc. etc. The list is endless.
I just don't buy an idea that some pixels have more responsibility for their choices than the person itself does.
Also when they start mentioning "dopamine" it makes me laugh. Brain just doesn't work that way. Dopamine doesn't make you do things, you make you do things. Dopamine is just a way for the brain to encode whatever you like. If you want to be addicted to facebook - it will encode facebook. If you want to have a healthy life - you'll get your dopamine exactly the same way when you get up in the morning, look outside and just think for yourself "this is a beautiful day", or when you solve a particular puzzle in your work, or when you say hi to a stranger. Brain has no shortage of dopamine and it is you who decide when it is released. Unless you are addicted of course. But don't blame the thing, work with the addiction instead, it's the only truthful way to stop being addicted.
Now, for some people who are highly addicted, quitting facebook completely - might be a good thing. Like for an alcoholic, it might be good to quite 100% of alcohol for a while. But it doesn't mean that a healthy person can easily enjoy a glass of wine every now and then and don't have any problems with it.
Are you saying that not using Google search has improved your quality of life?
Google search has gone significantly down in quality over the last year or so. Even just searching for simple things only seems to yield articles from the same 20 or so major websites, and it’s worse if you’re looking for niche items. DuckDuckGo on the other hand is starting to give relatively better and more diverse results these days.
The alternatives do not have better quality. I periodically go with DDG and realize I'm !g'ing everything.
It totally depends on how do you write your search query:
If you write "teen movie about vampires" or something equally vague, Google is king.
If you write a direct quote or the exact error message, without typos, DDG gives better results. I can also put sentences in quotes to force an exact match. DDG is just an older school search engine, so old school tricks work better.
I agree Google has gone downhill. DuckDuckGo is much better now.
Are you implying that Google search is any longer the only quality search engine? Honestly, I've been using DDG for years now and only less than 1% of my searches do I ever jump over to Google for.
In recent months I went from treating DuckDuckGo as some exotic search engine to using it many times a day. That is only because Google search is becoming useless, ad-ridden mess.
It has for me. Most of my searches are pretty generic and DDG does well enough. It has a nice dark theme and is fast and clean. And the !bangs are extremely useful. Saving a couple of seconds and a couple of clicks every search when I want to land up on the arch wiki or wikipedia adds up over time and I find it hard to go back to google now.
Some of Google's products e.g. Youtube are designed to be addictive, and in my experience addiction decreases one's quality of life. I still use the !sp operator on Duckduckgo to get proxied google results, you don't need a Google account for that.
Those are just tools that give you a lot of leverage if used correctly.
Instagram is a great tools for business, and now it's practically impossible to run one without using it. Twitter and reddit can provide you a ton of useful info that you will have a hard time finding anywhere else (or it will take way longer). I've built a business on Play Store.
It's all about how you use them.
I agree about the possible business use cases and to solve that issue I have created _business only_ accounts that are on a different browser, they are connected to my work email, they don't contain my personal data and I never use them outside of work tasks.
Do you expect these companies to stand still and wring their hands while you convince the government to stomp on their cash cows, or are they going to take some of the money you and your data have earned for them and lobby government more effectively than you ever could?
My bet’s on the latter. And so long as we all continue to support them (while claiming “but my boycott won’t do any good”), they’ll continue to use that financial support to ensure the continued non-involvement of the government in their affairs.
Doing nothing costs nothing, but it also changes nothing.
It's sad that your quality of life depends on Google or Facebook services.
I quit Facebook along with most Google services, I feel much happier and more well adjusted than when I was using them. Meeting with family and friends is also much more interesting because I don't have a constant stream detailing their life.
Good luck petitioning the government to act on it... this goes double for US businesses and people who live outside the US.
> It's sad that your quality of life depends on Google or Facebook services.
Quality of life is not a binary, where you either 'have' it or not, so I don't think it makes sense to say "your quality of life DEPENDS on google or Facebook"
Many things make your quality of life a bit better, and some things make it a bit worse, but no one says they can't have a quality life without Facebook or google.
The person is saying that stopping using Facebook and google will slightly decrease their overall quality of life, but will have zero impact on Facebook and google.
I understand that.
I still maintain it's sad that removing Facebook/Google can have any significant drop in your quality of life. And by significant, I mean one where you're willing to debate about it.
I like to keep my happiness as far as possible from the services that some soulless multinational provides.
You say you don't want your life to depend on a soulless multinational corporation.... but I suspect you might not be aware of how much it does.
Do you see a doctor, or use any healthcare services? Or use any pharmaceutical products or cosmetics that are mass produced? Shampoo? Soap? Hand sanitizer?
Do you wear clothing that you didn't make yourself from raw cotton you made? Or shop at a store like Gap, Cotton On, Target, Zara etc?
Do you drive a car? Or take Uber? Or use something like a bus or car, or other vehicle made by a large multinational engineering company?
Do you eat any fast foods? Or eat at restaurants that use any produce or mass produced raw ingredients? Or use any kitchen utensils or kitchenware? Do you shop at say IKEA?
Or do you use electronics like a laptop, phone or desktop computer?
Or do you keep any of your money at a bank? Or use things like car insurance?
It slightly irks me when people claim they want to stick it to the man, and don't like "those corporations".
We have a Green party politician in Australia who lives off the grid, and grows his own produce. Whilst I don't agree with all his policies - I respect that he lives consistently with his beliefs.
If you're on HN - I'd posit that your life (like mine, and billions of others) is dependent on multinational corporations for our current quality of life.
If you don't agree with one of them, that fine, but often it's less to do with principles and more "their customer service is terrible" or "they didn't fix this one issue that is very important to me", or "I read on Reddit/FB/Techcrunch this terrible fact about them"
Maybe their quality of life is increased by not having to spend part of their life (and possibly money - I can't think of a free Gmail alternative that's not as bad as Gmail's practices) searching for services that are at least as good as what they currently use?
> I can't think of a free Gmail alternative that's not as bad as Gmail's practices
Protonmail comes to mind:
I like the company, but their email service is nowhere close to being a GMail alternative. A few things that are lacking -
1. Using standard IMAP/POP is only available for Paid users and only on the desktop. Not Mobile.
2. Conversation view is not implemented on their mobile clients. It has been over 5 years - https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...
3. Their conversation view on the desktop groups messages based on the sender and not always the subject. It results in old conversations being grouped together.
They are working on all these issues, but till then, my productivity was impacted a lot by switching.
My happiness depends on all sorts of multinational. I depend on quick access to all sorts of medications, gasoline, shampoo, shipping, industrial food production, airplanes, and more. Why should technology be different?
>It's sad that your quality of life depends on Google or Facebook services.
Offhand the parent post would require me to give up Google Search (including via DDG), Gmail, Google Cloud, AWS, Amazon, Zappos, Audible, Comixology and Woot Shirts. I barely use Facebook or Twitter but the rest would lower my quality of life (and not just due to the large drop in employment opportunities I could take).
> Google Search (including via DDG)
DuckDuckGo doesn't use Google Search, so you'd be okay there.
It does if you do '!g' which most people do a lot as the Bing results are often crap.
No that just ends up redirecting your browser to google.com with the search query, it's equivalent to going there and typing it in yourself.
Which if you were to give up Google Search, is something you wouldn't be doing (or would have blocked).
Sure but there are plenty of perfectly acceptable alternatives to those services.
Which are, to me, of lower quality. Thus lower quality of life. Not zero quality of life. Just lower.
It's really not. Google.com is still there. You can use the alternatives 99% of the time and get what you're looking for. Google itself is not a perfect algorithm. It's exploitable, censorable, etc. It doesn't always find what you're looking for. You shouldn't ever limit yourself to a single search engine, honestly.
I think YouTube is a far stickier service than Google Search, just because it's acted as an informal video archive of the past 15 years of internet video history. But I fully recognize the risks with this monopoly structure in place and have started to embrace alternatives like https://odysee.com/ and https://rumble.com/. It's time to disentangle from monopolies. Take your digital sovereignty back.
To me they are close enough to not mind.
Especially when considering the unethical nature of these businesses and how they abuse their power.
That ties into the quality of the platform and it is alarming that some people will tolerate it for some comfort.
I don't think it lowers quality of life. YMMV of course.
Petition the government if you like. It doesn't matter. You don't have millions to donate to the next campaign or their personal enrichment. You're not who they care about.
You gotta be a man with principles. And why do you think your petitioning the government would make as much of an impact in this case, when opting out of using their services deprives them of revenue and data almost immediately?
>lower the quality of my life
Quitting Facebook will objectively increase your quality of life.
I use Facebook for my Etsy shop and finding funny FFXIV memes. Pretty much a ghost town of a feed beyond that. Both of which I feel increase my quality of life.
If your quality of life depends on big tech then I suspect your life is of low quality in the first place.
Different people fall into different lives for all sorts of reasons, not all intentional. Consider having a bit more compassion for others.
--
"'It ate his head. Another loser.'
She said to the two of them, 'It's easy to win. Anybody can win.'"
-- A Scanner Darkly
So, your definition of “different” is someone who uses Big Tech social networks?
> Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.
Ask the government to do something about it? They're allies, they're in it together.
There is no scenario where they don't take out encryption this decade. It's a top priority and big tech is going to very happily assist them. Big tech will give them what they want, they will act as an arm of tyranny assisting the government in smashing human rights, and in return they'll get to continue to expand (they'll get a light touch regulatory treatment). It now has a lot in common with how China handles their giant corporations (so long as you do what we tell you to, you get to exist and thrive), and big tech in the US looks more like a CCP apparatus by the passing day.
All forms of expression and speech will continue to be restricted more by the passing year. The government won't need to do it themselves, big tech will do the dirty work with a wink and nod. That includes all app stores, all online content and forums, all software.
So, when you can't petition your government any longer because it's hell bent on taking your liberty away, what does that leave? The War on Domestic Terrorism of course. They'll create it, spur it, and then have an excuse to crack down on their own invention (not terribly different from how they ran the war on drugs). The US will be a horrible place to live in the near future. The foreign war on terrorism, in which the US did such unbelievable vicious things to other nations, will now turn inward, and the monster will come home, rolling over human rights as it goes.
>Ask the government to do something about it? They're allies, they're in it together.
If that's how it is where you live, and you live in a democracy, you can change that.
A democracy isn't a democracy categorically, it's a democracy only if it behaves as a democracy. If elected representatives are behaving in the way they are with respect to encryption and tech anti-trust, then either it is an ineffectual, degenerate case of a democracy – and if the representatives are failing now, as they have been for at least a decade on this issue, when would throwing new ones be as effective as it needs to be? – or it is not fully a democracy.
If you want to reason from labels as if they are tautologies, here's a word for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anocracy
The alternative interpretation to what you propose is running for office. That's not out of the question but it's a decades-long pipeline with a lot of protections built in by convention. Outsiders are going to have difficulty until the current gen of representatives fades with age, and making headway is feasible only with the hope that the growing sphere of elite replacements are less competent behind the reigns if they decide to maintain their predecessors' policies.
Personally, I heavily rely on Google and Amazon. All my emails, purchases, photos, and browsing goes through them. Opting out would mean uprooting gigabytes of data to other services, which takes time to research, backup, and transfer. And even then you can't fully get rid of them, because switching to Apple from Android costs money, and I am not willing to root Android. This is merely my personal situation, but saying that people don't need Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon is ignoring the massive dependence these companies have forced onto users and the cost of leaving, which is not worth the time and money for many.
"massive dependence"
Switching from gmail to another provider isn't like living without electricity, it takes a couple of days updating some external accounts to reflect your new email; I did it.
Buying shit from somewhere that isn't Amazon isn't exactly trekking through the jungle for 3 weeks. All you have to do is type in another domain. There is no shortage of non-Amazon sellers with similar prices.
Switching from Chrome to Firefox takes 5 minutes, you can import your bookmarks and whatnot. Maybe you'll have to type in a password again. No climbing K2 level difficulty there either.
Android and iOS aren't that different, you can click a browser, camera, or email in either in the same amount of time with the same UI.
Sure it's effort, but it's not a hell of a lot of effort.
I hope you understand that this is all relative... what if you were in a situation where all of your friends/news are on Facebook? Where you don't have time to update 30+ accounts/subscriptions to reflect a new email address? Paying $500+ for an iPhone? Depending on the person, that is a hell of a lot of effort. If it wasn't, FAANG wouldn't be the empire it is today. It would be taking million user hits like WhatsApp after a single scandal.
Well, they got to where they are by being trusted at what they do. They have rapidly lost that trust, in my mind. Once a party violates some level of implicit trust, you have to distance yourself from that party. Big tech has shown their true colors. They will abuse their monopoly power to exploit politics, manipulate people, cut up and coming competitors off at the knees, and censor anything they don't agree with. This is not the web I signed up for. This is not the revolutionary open tech that kids like me that grew up in the 90s gushed about. This is a dystopian Orwellian nightmare. It's time to get off the ride.
I did it:
- LineageOS + MicroG and F-Droid for mobile.
- NextCloud (and DAV) running on an old laptop for calendar, contacts, and file storage. The mobile app uploads all my photos automatically. It backs up to Backblaze
-ProtonMail with a custom domain for email.
Amazon is pretty avoidable. Shipping has gotten faster and cheaper everywhere else at this point. At least for the rural place I am.
I'm not particularly tech savvy. This took a significant time effort for me. At this point, it's all pretty stable, I don't really have glitches anymore. I imagine the average HN user could easily replicate it, and if this type of setup got more popular, it would invariably get easier to set up.
What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it?
I was using a Pixel 2, but the list of well documented phones is available:
It's pretty simple if your phone is supported. You enable developer mode, enable USB debugging, download the image, and run a couple ADB commands. For me it was:
fastboot flashing unlock
fastboot update image.zip
And that was it.
>What phone did you load LineageOS on? Do you know of any guides for it?
Not GP, but I'd been using LineageOS on my HTC OneMax. I like it a lot.
Here's a list of supported devices:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
Click through the links on the above page for install guides.
It is good to see such implementations adopted more and more
I agree that going cold turkey on every trace of these orgs would be unrealistic. There's a lot to be said for locking down phones and shopping locally, but taking control of the assets those orgs hold is where it really pays off no matter who you are.
Migrating email is intimidating, but alleviates the highest cost risk and is actually pretty painless. In my own case, I started a Fastmail account and told it to use my own domain and sync from my gmail account. I didn't have to commit to anything until I felt like it. After a couple of weeks I started lazily updating a few subscriptions as they got forwarded from gmail, and replying to people with 'hey, check it out this is my new email'. Now, Fastmail could vanish and I'd be temporarily inconvenienced for only as long as it took to staple my domain to some other email host. Losing access to my gmail account before making that switch would have been a disaster.
>I am not willing to root Android.
Why is that? I'm not being snarky, I just don't understand why.
The difference between a rooted and non-rooted android is like the being in the wheel group or sudoers file on unix/linux and not being in them.
Personally, I like to have full control of my own property.
What reason do you have for not wanting that?
In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state? And it looks like the future is a situation where it's impossible to prevent software from detecting unlocks and refusing to run.
>In theory it's nice, in practice are there phones that you can root without leaving the bootloader in a vulnerable state?
I've always just unlocked the bootloader, then installed TWRP[0] (or similar) and then re-locked the bootloader.
Once a reasonable recovery partition is in place, you don't need keep the bootloader unlocked.
[0] https://twrp.me/
And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone?
>And then how do you actually do the rooting in a way that doesn't make your phone fail to boot? What model of phone?
That's dependent on which phone you have and what software you have on that phone.
Here's a few places to start:
I'd add that there's a wealth of information (and not just about rooting/unlocking bootloaders) about Android tools, software, development and phone capabilities here:
I am... aware. For a general search on this topic I tend to get results about oneplus, for example, that say that relocking breaks it.
And samsung just won't unlock US models.
And xiaomi factory resets the phone when relocking.
Searching for relock root android gives very unhelpful results in general.
I did learn there's one specific model of motorola where the "lock" just doesn't work, and that's amusing but not very useful.
So I meant your phone specifically. Not just rooting, but rooting with a currently-locked bootloader. Please tell me a little bit about an example where this actually works. And hopefully passes safetynet, and will keep passing safetynet with hardware attestation.
My phone? An HTC OneMax (t6vzw).
I unlocked my bootloader (cf. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-s-off-root-your-htc...), installed TWRP[0] and then re-locked my bootloader.
I then variously installed different custom roms (LineageOS, NuSense, ResurrectionRemix) and in between re-flashed the stock rom.
I used SuperSU and AddonSU to root the installed images. Magisk is also a popular rooting tool (AIUI, the MagiskHide component blocks Google Play from identifying the device as rooted as well).
Once I installed TWRP, I was able to do all of those things with a locked bootloader and had zero problems running any Android application.
I'd note that LineageOS[1] supports hundreds of different phones.
Any reasonably tech savvy person can do this fairly easily and a non-tech savvy person can do so with a modicum of effort.
If you're actually interested, I'll happily sell you my services to do this on your phone.
And I promise you that I will charge you an outrageously large amount for those services. It's definitely not worth it, but I'd be happy to take your money.
[0] https://twrp.me/
HTC, interesting. Okay, that's the first brand I've looked into where relocking actually seems viable!
This is not a "how do I root???" situation. You have a much better brand than most people.
And I've used magisk fine, but hardware attestation is rolling out and if anything starts to require that then anyone that can't relock their phone can't fake it. Edit: And it might fail anyway according to https://twitter.com/topjohnwu/status/1278849731305672705?s=1...
Also good luck doing anything with my current phone. After long enough being unable to find a reasonable phone that had 600MHz support, an SD card, and rootability, I gave up and got a samsung. The bootloader won't allow anything.
>Also good luck doing anything with my current phone. After long enough being unable to find a reasonable phone that had 600MHz support, an SD card, and rootability, I gave up and got a samsung. The bootloader won't allow anything.
I did a bunch of research as well, and recently bought a Motorola Edge[0] (not Edge+) which has pretty much everything you mentioned, including support for up to a 1TB SD card.
I haven't rooted it yet, but I should have no problem doing so if/when I decide to do so (when I require a feature I don't have and/or Motorola stops upgrading the OS).
Samsung says[1] there shouldn't be a problem with locking/unlocking the bootloader.
And other sites[2] confirm this for newer Samsung phones.
What's more, there's additional development work[3] on bypassing Safety Net as well.
Even more, moving away from Play Services and installing MicroG[4] addresses the issue as well.
I don't even own a Samsung phone and I found all this out in less than five minutes. I can understand if you don't want to put in the time and effort, but just saying it doesn't work (N.B., you didn't mention the specific Samsung model you have which may complicate things, but none of the info I've seen -- including Samsung's docs -- say that the bootloader can't be unlocked/relocked) when there's ample evidence that most (if not all) Samsung devices can be unlocked/rooted/relocked and still pass safety net checks.
Besides, even if you don't root the device, installing a custom recovery partition will allow nandroid backups[5], which are clearly superior to other backup mechanisms.
Regardless, I hope you get/have the features and performance you desire, and are able to keep using your device long after Samsung stops supporting it (my HTC stopped getting updates with KitKat/4.4 in 2015, but I've continued to update it and currently run LineageOS 17.1/AndroidQ on it), as there's no reason to buy a new phone as long as you can run recent software versions.
In fact, the only reason I purchased a new device was for VoLTE[6] support, which the HTC OneMax doesn't have.
I wish you many years of quality use from your device.
[0] https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-motorola-edge/p
[1] https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/Others/Unlocking-The-Boo...
[2] https://www.getdroidtips.com/how-to-unlock-bootloader-on-sam...
[3] https://www.xda-developers.com/bypass-safetynet-hardware-att...
[5] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28296/how-to-ful...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE
Edit: Fixed link reference numbers and typos.
> Motorola Edge
I looked at all the screen defect reports and high price and decided not to risk it.
> Samsung says[1] there shouldn't be a problem with locking/unlocking the bootloader.
> And other sites[2] confirm this for newer Samsung phones.
More specifically, Samsung phones for the US with qualcomm chips cannot be unlocked. The nice little menu option in that article is just not there.
> What's more, there's additional development work[3] on bypassing Safety Net as well.
If they decide to remove the fallback, that method dies.
> I don't even own a Samsung phone and I found all this out in less than five minutes.
The info on samsung models is a mess because they put out almost identical phones with different chipsets and subtly different capabilities.
All the non-US models, almost all with exynos chips, can be unlocked but that does me no good.
> you didn't mention the specific Samsung model you have which may complicate things
S20 FE 5G SM-G781U1 if you really want to know.
> Besides, even if you don't root the device, installing a custom recovery partition will allow nandroid backups[5], which are clearly superior to other backup mechanisms.
I know, and I wish I could do that.
>> Motorola Edge
>I looked at all the screen defect reports and high price and decided not to risk it.
That concerned me a bit too. I got a deal ($499 IIRC) on the device and decided to risk it.
I've had no screen issues at all and like it a lot. Then again, I've only had it for four months, so I guess we'll see.
>More specifically, Samsung phones for the US with qualcomm chips cannot be unlocked. The nice little menu option in that article is just not there.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. I didn't catch that in my initial search.
That sucks. I'm glad I didn't purchase a Samsung.
I had similar goals as you did in a new device: fast processor, lots of RAM, large internal storage and large SDCard support, long battery life.
I considered another HTC device, but my experience with them dropping support almost immediately (~9 months after I bought it) for upgrades really pissed me off.
And since I'm not going to buy a new phone every year or two (there's no reason to replace a perfectly good phone just because the OEM drops support in an attempt to get you to buy a new one), especially when there are better Android implementations (e.g., LineageOS) without all the bloatware.
As such, rootable/bootloader unlockable was very important to me too.
Maybe I'm just old and crotchety, but I figure that if I purchase a physical product, I should be able to do with it as I choose, without restriction. This whole 'we decide what you can and can't do, and what software you can and can't run with the very expensive device you've "purchased"' schtick is unacceptable to me.
This is yet another area where we need legislation to address this in the US.
I am aware that there are specific FCC regulations that require specific ranges of transceiver power levels and related stuff, but since the baseband processor code is generally proprietary and requires binary blobs from the manufacturer, that really shouldn't be an issue.
Perhaps if we make enough noise, we can make that a reality.
> This is yet another area where we need legislation to address this in the US.
Agreed.
I'm tolerating it on this phone since they announced pretty long term support, but it's far from what the situation should be.
'You can't change how they operate'
We used yo have laws..
And opting out is literslly impossible, there are people and authorities i -have-to- communicate with, and its impossible outside those platforms
What people and authorities?
I stopped using these services and told people to contact me via sms or signal. No problems so far.
The people who won't make that extra step aren't worth my time because clearly I'm not worth their time.
> What people and authorities?
- Make bank account.
- Bank forces you to use their app for obtaining TANs.
- App refuses to run because "your phone is rooted", i.e. because you removed Google's crap.
- No bank account for you, sorry bro.
I have personally been through this shit. Sure, some banks offer using a physical TAN generator - but not all!
Fair point.
That is a situation where I'd move bank, use an iPhone or just allow GServices on my device.
There is certainly a point where you just need to be pragmatic above all else. Otherwise, you can still reduce your interactions with their other services as much as possible.
Have you considered just making your own bank?
Not sure what TANs are, but why not using a separate (SIMless) old/cheap Android device only for that?
In my case, unofficial communication channel for college/school/job. You can handle it just with offical email and classes or phone but since everyone is on 1 app and basically no one on any other you loose out anything which is not necessary but not helpful. And goodluck convincing a non tech boss or several profs to switch. This is kinda the issue with network effects.
It's not impossible. You just have to make choices.
Building management, landlord, local charities and residents association are using whatsapp and Facebook, good luck moving them.
Far better to opt in, recover control of the legislature from the large corporations and Reclaim the State.
There's nowhere to run away to.
> You can't change how they operate.
You can, by pressuring politicians to create laws and regulations. It’s just something the US hasn’t tried all that much lately.
Amazon is great, Twitter can be great if you use it well, and the other two are pretty easy to drop.
I’m there. We’re early, everyone else will eventually abandon ship.
Let me get my dusty PDP-11 then... /s
This seems like a perfect use case for a PWA
would be interested to hear from googlers what's going on
Why is Element suspended but not Signal? Is Signal compromised?
Good bye free speech. Hello unbridled control and censorship.
These actions have been so fast and furious and brazen that you have to wonder: They obviously see people as cattle, but are they right? Or, do they have an ace up their sleeve that makes the answer irrelevant?
Time to Riot again.
Not funny. Do you think the riots are leading to better society/life ?
Riot is the name of another Matrix client.
I'm pretty sure Riot was the original name of Element until 2020.
Vector was the name, before they renamed to Riot.
Sweet. Was not aware. Thanks!
I believe the parent comment is referencing the fact that the Element application used to be called Riot [1].
The other comments are right. I found it mildly amusing that this happened after the name change, which was presumably in part motivated by some worries over political correctness.
Sorry for the confusion, throwaway.
That is often what riots aim to do, yes.
According to Durkheim , riots and really crime in general have the purpose of pointing out (perceived or real) deficiencies in society.
Element.io rebranded from Riot.
Like the other comments said, that wasn't the meaning, but also yes.
Riot is the name of another Matrix client
*edited - the old name of Element, apparently.
According to my country's history, they indeed did.
How can I install Matrix on an android phone without using the Google Play store?
F-Droid is the best way for open source apps, but also most APKs are available outside of Play Store via websites like https://www.apkmirror.com/. It's a bit of a risk to load apps like that, though.
It's a shame EV certs are so hard to get. APK signatures use certificates and we could use the already existing CA infrastructure to make app stores unnecessary but stuff didn't work out that way.
How do push notifications work when it's not intergated with Google Play?
F-Droid has Element and a few other Matrix clients available.
There is other clients available too.
The protocol is essentially decentralized
It's on F-Droid.
Bookmarking this one for when my friends chide me for “still” using iOS.
On Android, it's still much easier to install apps from outside Google's app store (just change the "install unknown apps" setting, download the .apk file, and open it) than it is on iOS.
As a practical matter, though, only a very small number of people will ever do that. Being kicked out of the play store is almost always going to be a death sentence for the app.
Apple has earned plenty of criticism themselves, but I do appreciate that they curate the app store with humans.
But if both Apple and Google remove your app from their stores, at least Android has a fairly straightforward method for your users to install it straight from your website.
For iOS your users will have to sign it themselves (but still via Apple, who could block that too) with their own developer account, just to get a time-limited install. Or, even worse, use a jailbroken device to work around all this.
Maybe we should be jailbreaking again
They should kick Facebook out of the play store. See what happens. Facebook can then pivot to paying OEMs even bigger sums of money to bundle it with their devices.
It's trivial to sideload apps on most Android devices. You can't sideload on iOS unless you jailbreak or spend some time and money on a developer account, and even then you're rather limited on what you can do.
Side loading is clunky.
If Android were really as free and open as everyone says it is, then there would be a method built into the os to download and install apps directly through the web browser, without hunting through settings and enabling it.
As it is, this is barely better than iOS, and I’m kind of disgusted that everyone thinks it’s fine and normal as a solution.
It's not thaaat clunky. With my phone I click the download link, it downloads the apk, asks me if I want to allow to installing apps from the browser and then asks me to install the app. Installing a program in Windows is more complicated 95% of the time.
On top of that, if you have a rooted phone, you can use F-Droid to automatically install updates. For me updating apps from F-Droid is actually more convenient than updating apps from the play store, which I have to manually install.
There absolutely could be phone vendors selling LineageOS phones with F-Droid as the default app store. The only really important thing that would be missing for a lot of people would be WhatsApp.
The difference is, good luck getting Element installed on iOS if Apple removes it from the app store.
On Android you just grab an APK or use F-Droid and it's a couple taps.
Lots of google fans on this website.
Like legit it’s like the inverse of wading through the comments section on macrumors.
If you think this isn't coming to iOS next you've got another thing coming.
If you actually do care about privacy and free speech and aren't using an iPhone because they're fashionable in your country then you should check out purism and pine64. They're the only phones I know of that are designed not to run "mobile OSes".
It’s not that iOS is safe from this, it’s that in all practicality, Google is not really that different as what my friends popularly suggest. Android is not a free, open OS. Well, it is to a point, but realistically that point is not much further than ios for most users.
As for an alternative mobile OS, I would love to get my hands on Sailfish, but it’s not available for the US.
How are you liking the new Fortnite update ;) ?
SMH playing games on a cell phone os LMAOROTFLLOLLLLLLLL
F-Droid, or use Element as a PWA.
'Private company, they do what they want' gang arriving in 3, 2, 1..
'Private company, they do what they want'
That's correct, but we can still boycott companies that do this.
We really can't. Smartphones are practically a mandatory part of modern life. My previous job required me to have one for tons of work-related authentication/software.
There is no choice outside Google/Apple when it comes to mobile devices. None which are fully compatible with a normal person's way of life, or which provides access to the same apps.
It may be technically possible to avoid them, but 'technically possible' and 'competitive alternative' are worlds apart.
The alternative is the pinephone. It's coming along and has gotten to the point where it's stable and fast. Most distros will probably have MMS support at some point this year.
That doesn't help if everyone you want to interact with refuses to talk to you if you don't have an iPhone because doing that has become fashionable.
> That doesn't help if everyone you want to interact with refuses to talk to you if you don't have an iPhone because doing that has become fashionable.
People do this?? Wow, that is unbelievably snobby.
That's true, but you can also disagree with the decision. It's not iOS where there's no alternative.
I'm convinced they think they'll be billionaires one day and so always jump to their defense.
No one is convinced of that. Do you only advocate for things because you’re afraid you’ll be in the same position someday?
Well I can't think of a better explanation why so many people jump to these corporation's defense when they do something this immoral and damaging.
Perhaps they like the value proposition and would like to continue participating in the mutually beneficial transaction with these corporations as we all should in a free society. Your opinion is not more valid than your opponents’. “Immoral” is highly subjective.
Not if the "Hanlon’s Razor" crew gets here first
Wouldn't this just not be a problem if they rewrote it in Rust?
Add a blockchain in there and we're in business.
Only if it would be on the blockchain.
Just monopolies protecting our democracy, like Adam Smith envisioned.
Does that make you part of the obnoxiously useless comment gang?
I feel like the "App Stores" are kinna on war with the minority recently
I don't understand what google want to do...Evil.
Huh! That's unfortunate. But in the end it's Google's platform and they have the right to kick you out for any or without any reason and/or recourse. If Element doesn't like it they can just make their own Android, play store and sell billions of phones around the world. It's a non-issue.
Agreed! This is just the free market in action. This is a good thing.
> This is just the free market in action.
It's not free marked at all.
Free marked is about having a competition between companies where the user decides who wins by buying the best products.
The concept of a free marked was invented before there had been massive marked limiting factors like "lock down" of digital devices and similar.
Somehow a lot of people still take all the original arguments why a free marked is good but then use them to argue for a marked which is neither free nor has the marked dynamics anymore which make a free marked a potential "good" marked strategy.
In the end a free marked needs to have proper competition. Weather that is limited by the government or by companies abusing a change in technological landscape which gives them powers which originally at best governments had doesn't matter, it's no longer a free marked at all and no of the reasons why it's supposedly good do uphold then.
I'm think GP is missing an /s :)
Actually not! I think capitalism always trends towards centralization of power. I went fishing for "actually, this isn't a free market because..." and caught me a big one.
Pure capitalism (anarchy) is just people exchanging things via barter. Government is generally to blame when things get too centralised (either by fiddling the market or by not enforcing antitrust).
> Pure capitalism (anarchy) is just people exchanging things via barter.
Anarchy and capitalism are two extremely different things, and also there are methods of free association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_(Marxism_and_...) that allow for distributed production without any centralization OR private ownership of production/profit-driven exchange.
Granted, we're far off from these things probably, but capitalism is turning out to be a steaming pile of shit so it's good to think about what comes after without turning into a centrally-planned hell hole.
Ah, I mean the purest form of capitalism is one without any government or monetary system controlling the currency or tax on transactions. I think this is a reasonable statement.
Capitalism, much like democracy it's the least-worst system out there.
I believe most of the problems we're facing with it are challenges of scale. Especially in the US, it's just too big. Maybe breaking everything up back to the state level would be a good idea?
> Maybe breaking everything up back to the state level would be a good idea?
No matter what, I'm almost always in favor of decentralization/distribution of power and resources, so I could get behind this.
Right now, the only solution to this situation seems to be sticking to SMS and newer non-IP protocols extending and/or replacing it as a service offered in the regulated TelCo market (in EU at least, but practically in most places). Then mid-term extend regulations to IP- and web-based markets as well, forcing checks/balances, appeals, and an open ecosystem of alternative providers in place where there is feudalism right now. Won't work with FAANG providing services "for free"; that is, by bundling and ad-financed offerings. So bundling has to be regulated as well.