Vincentvd

I have been raised with the phrase that voting a duty because a democratic system is not for granted and the rights to vote have been fought for. I live in the Netherlands and I don't say it is perfect (far from) but we have a democratic, functional political system. It is moving to the right quickly but as long as I can vote I will. There is no anarchistic party of course but I at least use my vote to vote for left.

I actually started with it this week. It is partially due to privacy but also because I lost a sense for value. It is really easy to press a button online and pay say 20 euro. Not that I am irresponsible with money but the numbers on your bank account feel so meaningless.

I think this is the general conclusion in the topic that it depends on the situation. Maybe at the moment, emotion will also alter your decision at the moment. I suppose I would indeed never accept service to attack another country, only to defend my own country/land.

I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won't stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don't buy premium.

"Your info won't be used for ads". Does that also mean that they won't collect any info about you? Theoretically, they don't have any reason to collect data anymore because you pay them.

They main problem I have with this is that we don't have a decent alternative for youtube yet. The main reason I don't want to pay for youtube is because it is Google. With YT premium you don't buy privacy (logically you would say with removing ads you also remove the need to track people).

I personally self host tt-rss on my freedombox. I use the web and android client. If you don't want to self host, maybe you can use Feedly. I am not sure how privacy friendly that is if that is also a requirement.

I use an rss reader to follow like 50 websites. The main news sites are arstechnica, the verge, IGN, Polygon and many snaller websites that post less than once a week

And I suppose it is fine that not everybody interacts. They still do something with that knowledge only not publicly. Imagine if those 99% also start interacting. I suppose a community will become messy and people will stop interacting at the end because they don't feel heard because some people overshadow then with their voice.

"The act of following another account is impersonal and one-sided. Building meaningful relationships with other people is second to amassing an audience."

This is an interesting statement. While building two-sided relations is indeed very important, it often also is the case that i follow people because they post for example interesting content i want to follow. That person just cant follow everybody back but still provide meaningfull information to lots of people.

That is nice. I never used firefox long enough to find these detailed settings. it is a shame there user share declined so much. It is good to have another browser engine around

Chrome is way overrated, just like edge (a little less) in my opinion. They focus heavily on speed and not on actually giving a unique browsing experience. They dont help you browse the internet efficiently and organized like browsers like Vivaldi do. The appearence of these browsers (and firefox to) stayed quite similar over time. There are better browsers, people just follow the masses and dont even try out new onces.